Romantic Poetry in a World of Scientific Workshops

[Leanne]

I don't know anyone who believes in God or Satan. I don't know anyone who writes or reads poetry. I live in a world where whatever you say or do is cool with everybody else and nothing ever happens. Everybody is nice. If you're sick and dying lots of people will come to your bedside and cry and say, I'm so sorry this is happening to you, man. And nothing ever happens. Everybody is understanding, and bright, and knowing, and nice. Everything is fun and easy and nice every day and every night and it always has been and always will be forever.

Milton was blind, not deluded. I don't think he truly believed that an absence of belief in God was at the root of man's inhumanity to man. In truth, he couldn't really agree with anyone else's definition of what God is -- certainly not the populist deity that people bang on about these days. He was very good at pointing out flaws and forcing readers to re-think their most dearly held beliefs, but at the end of the day he didn't really offer much in the way of solutions. Nor was his an enlightenment philosophy, by which one would have to arrive at a solution personal to oneself in the tradition of the Buddha. No, he was a judge and we were found wanting, but without knowing what we were wanting.

I love Milton. I think that without him, much of philosophy and social theory would be very different. Nonetheless, he is just one stepping stone in a very long path. Milton's concepts of free speech, and especially freedom of the press, have been twisted into barbed weapons that bear no resemblance to the romantic notion of freedom. His arguments against censorship have allowed these very proponents of "free speech" to become censors themselves. Is this Milton's fault? Of course not. It is the fault of successive misinterpretations and cherry picking -- just the same cherry picking one does when one says things like "Milton said this thing I agree with and now that Milton's dead nobody else understands me".

Milton's been dead a while. If nobody understands you, it's because you're not trying to be understood. That's a choice that has nothing to do with whether or not angels are fornicating above you.