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:
In previous posts, I have outlined a couple people to look into and annotated a few sources I have checked into. Here, I would like to go on with that list by adding some blogs and new media, since my project will work with that. But also, I would like to focus a little more on Milton. I realize that it will be really easy to fall into the trap of making Milton fall to the wayside in favor of the modern application. So I need to find some sources that deal strictly with Milton and so I am not forgetting him. I already did this some, but I could do it more. So here it goes.
An aspiring military chaplain, he posts numerous links to Edward Snowden's leaks and articles about the NSA.
I've already talked to him, and he's been willing to help me find more things as they pop up.
Google+ Media
Communities are few and far between that deal strictly with the NSA and Edward Snowden, but all you have to do is type in #NSA or #Snowden on the search bar and you come up with this.
This is an invaluable source for breaking news information I could use to further my argument.
Typing in #Milton or #JohnMilton lends very few results.
The more I look at what I'm doing, the more I'm realizing that there hasn't been much scholarship regarding the Patriot Act and Milton in an official sense, but there are a few people who have picked up the narrative.
As I will largely be constructing this narrative in the form of modern happenings, I will be utilizing a lot of newspaper articles and press releases and news clips. It will also take awhile to sort through everything I have found to utilize what I want. However, this is my start. If any of you have or come across something juicy, would you please let me know? Thanks!
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.
In class and on this blog we have discussed the illumination that comes in understanding Paradise Lost when we listen to it. The beauty of the poem comes into full view when we hear the rhythm of the words. Poetry was meant to be listened to as much as it was meant to be read. So I decided to listen to Samson Agonistes (you can listen to it here). While reading Samson Agonistes was interesting to me, listening to it amplified the pain Samson was going through and his father's agony at his death. I decided to look up what people had to say about listening to books and poetry versus reading it, and I came across this article from Forbes. Here's what caught my eye in the article:
When I wrote this paper, I decided that I should look into Milton's education, but that I should spend the majority of my time on comparisons between Iago and Satan. I realized my paper was really going to be too long unless I just took one or two specific examples from the works, so I focused on one good example from each work to compare and discuss why it is evidence that Iago is a model for Satan.
Keep reading, my post will deal with this eventually.
As a modern reader of Paradise Lost I am always tempted to look at Adam and Eve as equals and apply that belief to the story. But the fact of the matter is that Adam and Eve are never equals in this story. Adam is always superior. This should be unsurprising given the anti-feminist movement going on during Milton's day. He would have had easy access to the pamphlets circulating, as scholars such as Shannon Miller suggest. It's easy to read Milton's poem and think, "Yeah, here's another example of misogyny," yet the arguments between Adam and Eve in Book X of Milton's poem actually allows readers to consider the whole premise of the Fall. Women during Milton's day were looked at as seducers because of the interpretation of the creation myth, and so any arguments women made for themselves were looked at as seductive and not to be trusted. So when Adam blames Eve when God asks what's up, he has a perfectly valid excuse for blaming her: she was obviously up to no good. What's a man to do when she can't even open her mouth without trying to sway him from his will?
So how does this all tie in with my first idea, that Adam is always superior and never looks at Eve as an equal? Well, it has to do with the many Adam and Eve creation myths circulating out there.
Why yes, this is very true. And a woman went to prison over letting her assistant know about a self-written search warrant which was handed to her (see link to speech).
After the terrorist attacks of 9-11, America reassessed what it meant to be free, and that included the freedom to exchange ideas. One of the biggest things the terrorist attacks brought about was the Patriot Act. If you are interested in knowing more specifically how many of your rights (off of the Bill of Rights) you have lost because Congress passed this law, then go here. It is part one of three of a speech that Judge Napolitano gives describing the Patriot Act and the rights it infringes on. The law itself, he says, if brought to a court, would be deemed unconstitutional (specifically regarding government officials being able to write self-written search warrants). What our government is trying to do here is exactly what Milton, in his Areopagitica, deems impossible to do: manage to keep everyone safe from every idea that might point to possible terrorist acts.
Do we believe in our first amendment rights? While Milton wasn't radical enough to suggest that the people of England have complete freedom of the press, he did advocate for freedom to share and distribute ideas, because that's how we gain new knowledge. In his Areopagitica, Milton argues that you can't get rid of problems by censorship and monitoring. It does more damage to truth than it does good. And if you don't have all sorts of information spreading, how are people to grow and determine what exactly truth is supposed to be? "Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue. For the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike. This justifies the high providence of God, who though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us even to a profuseness all desirable things and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety."
Nowadays we don't have to worry about censorship, right? Think again.
Milton utilizes so many flowery and witty things in his work, and that has somewhat annoyed me, but after class on Monday I realized just what a risk he was taking. So I went back to the introduction on On Reformation, and this is what it said: "others—notably William Prynne, Henry Burton, and John Bastwick—had opened their mouths against bishops and been punished with imprisonment, branding, and the loss of their ears."
Speaking out against prelates meant risking his physical self, not just a little slap on the wrist and a "don't do that again." By the time Milton was writing those really radical treatises on divorce and freedom (which don't seem that radical now simply because we have those nice things), he was really pressing his luck. We talked about the Restoration of the king during Milton's lifetime, and I just did a quick internet search about it. Apparently he had a few friends willing to hide him that summer, and it is the only reason he wasn't arrested.
Once I got past Milton's flowery language that strove to obscure his obvious dislike of religious hierarchy, I was able to find points I disagreed with—points I disagreed with for historical reasons.
Did it bother anyone else that Eve is content to be an object in Paradise Lost? It got my feminist tendencies going a little bit. I have "ugh" written in the margins of the section where she says:
“My author and disposer, what thou
bidd’st
Unargued I obey; so God ordains,
God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more
Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise."
Milton, John (2009-10-28). The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (Modern Library) (Kindle Locations 14820-14823). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
"The terms place and space do not signify something different from
the body that is said to be in a place; they merely mean its size, shape,
and position relative to other bodies.... [N]o object has a permanent
place except by the determination of our thought."
~Descartes Philosophical Writings
(Space and Place in "Paradise lost" by John Gillies)
The above is the popular thought regarding space and place during Milton's day. Given all the talk about where the Earth was in comparison with the Sun and the rest of the universe, it is unsurprising that Descartes and other philosophers would hold this view. After all, Copernicus and Galileo paved the way for new modes of thinking about our place in the universe and our relation to it. But this isn't the kind of philosophy Milton uses in Paradise Lost.
So why did Milton choose to go against the grain? Does having Heaven, Earth, and Hell in unmovable places make a significant difference to the book? I think it's easier to tell an epic tale where people are moving when one has unmovable places in space. But did Milton have another reason? What do you all think?
I have a love-hate relationship with Satan. He takes the things I preach and uses them to manipulate. It's brilliant. It's human. I'll finish explaining in the video.
