Except this is really my last one of my undergraduate career.
Still, it feels never-ending. Probably will be.
I'll be honest: there's very little of Milton that I felt any connection to. Scott wrote a post about T.S. Eliot and his thoughts on Milton, and I responded to it with the following: "Verbose inefficiency seems a good description for what I've been annoyed with." There were only a few times that I found myself interested in Milton's work. Those times were his Divorce Tracts and Areopagitica. That's not to say that I didn't find class discussions and the primary texts interesting. I just mean to say that Milton didn't astound me with his poetry the way that Eliot does. I don't like very much poetry, so I will always be more fond of prose.
First off, I don't know how my paper would have turned out if I hadn't done this process, but I know for sure that it wouldn't be as well-focused and well-informed. The sources I was able to attain from this process are more useful than the one's I had found on Milton. Now, the correspondence. I got around to emailing two people, Dr. Vincent Blasi, a professor of Law at Columbia who wrote an article on Milton and the First Amendment. He hasn't emailed me back yet (and I'm really not sure he will), but this is the email I sent:
Milton’s political tracts boldly
declare his belief that in order for the people to be a functioning,
self-governing body, they had to have the right to uncensored information. This
belief, completely rejected by Parliament, would come up later in American
government with the creation of the First Amendment. Yet in America today,
we’re struggling with the same problems Milton faced in his time. How do we, as
a people, make informed decisions about our government if we don’t have the
freedom of information? Is it possible to strike a balance between a
transparent government and free flow of information and government secrets and
operatives’ safety? Like Milton, we have several figures in the world that are willing to risk their lives for their belief that the
uncensored exchange of ideas and information is tantamount for the people to
avoid corrupt government, oppression, and social injustice. While many names
come to mind, I would like to focus on two main figures in this regard:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Both
Assange and Snowden believe that the only way to truly make change for the
better is to let people see what’s really going on in all sectors of government
and economics. Milton’s premise of freedom of information in Areopagitica completely supports this
view.
I've been seriously considering what I'm interested in writing for the final paper, and based off of my previous blog posts, I've decided to deal with Areopagitica and how it applies to what is currently going on with the NSA spying and the Patriot Act. Back in August, I bookmarked an article from the Guardian that I found interesting and important. Of course this is just the beginning of my research. I fully intend to use my information from my other blog posts about censorship to supplement my current research.
The Guardian also posted a video about how the NSA spying affects you:
Essentially, what I'm exploring is how censorship, even in the form of information gathering, hurts progress because people are afraid to speak freely and the government can attack you if you say things they don't like. Censorship in Milton's day was about preventing those types of things from being published in the first place, and the point of the NSA surveillance and the Patriot Act is to make sure you aren't even thinking about saying things that may undermine the government's ideal state, and it's completely legal under the secret "official interpretation" of the Patriot Act.
After the jump break I'll have a couple of the sections I find critical in this article as well as the quotes from Areopagitica that I find particularly illuminating about the issues we're facing with the problems of the Patriot Act and how the NSA interprets it.
