Towards the Light, By AC Grayling

In 1950, Bertrand Russell reflected on the conflict between North and South Korea and asked "If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote?" Now we know that Ethiopia's famines in the 1980s owed more to her communist government's policies than inclement weather, that more than half of Zimbabwe will soon need food aid thanks to Mugabe's tyranny and that the average North Korean enjoys not a bag of grain but a handful of straw for his dinner, we can give the great philosopher a definitive answer. As Russell suspected, the vote is the only way to guarantee the grain will be forthcoming.

AC Grayling is a philosopher of the same mind, and has written a book detailing the long and perilous struggle for the freedoms we enjoy today in the hope that we will be inspired to defend them rather better than we have recently managed. Grayling charts the progress of liberty from its modern roots in the Reformation through the end of absolute monarchy to contemporary conventions on human rights, pointing out every bloodstain on the way. He warns us not to view this story as one of inexorable progress.

What strikes one most about his narrative is not the courage of men like Sebastian Castellio, the French theologian and defender of heretics, or the clear thinking of philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, but the sheer good fortune we have to thank for our condition. The struggle was often not one for freedom as such, but for the victory of an alternative system of bondage, whether religious or secular. The state of liberty was as much a stalemate between competing dogmas as a positive achievement. We should treasure our freedoms not so much because people suffered to attain them, but because they are in a large part the result of happenstance, of ideas and events that did not have to lead to our liberty.

The author's immediate foes are the British and American governments, which have rolled back civil liberties in response to terrorism. Yet it is glaring that despite occasional excursions to France, his tale is largely one of the English-speaking world. As Margaret Thatcher notoriously noted, "In my lifetime all the problems have come from mainland Europe and the solutions have come from Britain and North America". Western Europe's freedom was won and then guaranteed by the English-speaking powers, and one can't help feeling they have never appreciated the gift.

Grayling remarks that when the threat to our freedoms came from armies, the response was clear – fighter jets and silos of nuclear missiles ready. But he does not mention that for much of Europe it meant allowing the US to do these things on their behalf while the money saved was spent on public servants and welfare entitlements.

Mainstream continental opinion does not merely tolerate religious extremism, it condones it. When a Danish cartoonist was sent into hiding as mobs went on the rampage, the French supermarket chain Carrefour took Danish products off its shelves and put up banners proclaiming "solidarity with the Islamic community".

Grayling writes with one eye on demographic projections showing that Muslims may be in a majority in Europe within a few generations. He notes that if they pursue a traditional form of their faith, the rights that women and homosexuals, not to mention cartoonists, enjoy today may then be seen as a brief aberration. It has happened before – when classical civilisation was engulfed by Christianity and sank into a 1,000-year dark age. Western citizens have more than compulsory identity cards to worry about, which is precisely why the author is right that we should not compromise our rights even this far.

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