Just Finished Reading: Towards the Light – The Story of the struggles for Liberty and Rights that made the modern West by A C Grayling

I was doing my best to resist reading any non-fiction history on top of my recent batch of historical novels but could hardly resist something like this – a long look at the idea of liberty by one of my all-time favourite modern philosophers. Needless to say I was not disappointed.

Set within a chronological narrative Professor Grayling starts with the fight for religious freedom from was, at that time, the only major Western faith – Catholicism. The great schism that produced the Protestant churches (themselves the product of later schisms) was the spark that lit the fuse which blew apart the idea of any kind of unassailable power based on simple authority. From that point there was no going back. After religious liberty was established it, rather inevitably, led to greater and greater freedom of thought – freedom that led to scientific investigation that ultimately began to undermine the idea of religion itself. Once the authority of the church (and even God) had been questioned, challenged and, to varying degrees overthrown, it was not long before these free thinkers began looking at the power and authority (often seen as divine in nature) of those who ruled over us. Questions of their legitimacy soon followed along with calls from greater and greater enfranchisement of the population. Hot on the heels of those questions came the issues of women’s rights, slavery, and the rights of racial minorities. All in all it has been a hard fought and hard won fight for the increasing liberty of individuals within a more just society. Progress indeed!

There were many things I liked about this book – not least of which was the author’s impressive breadth of knowledge and ease of bringing an immense subject down to manageable proportions. He also introduced me to some new men and women who fought for the freedoms that many of us – including me – often take for granted. I have been quoting some of those here over the last few weeks. In the almost 300 page book I only had a single gripe. The author rightly stated that both the French and American revolutions and declaration of rights had a huge influence on liberty in the modern West. Were I disagreed with him was his seemingly blinkered statement that, before 9/11 and the resulting increase in restrictions on freedoms enshrined in the Patriot Acts and other legislation, American was in some way a singular shining paragon of virtue. Now I will be the first to say that my knowledge of American history is rather incomplete and is, in some areas, rather sketchy but just off the top of my head I can think of slavery (which the author considered to be unfortunate in the US), the virtual extinction of its indigenous population, the treatment of African –Americans after slavery was banned, the treatment of Japanese-Americans during WW2, the McCarthy witch hunts, the Salem witch trials, the treatment of women and gays, the treatment of atheists and other ‘minority’ groups, the union busting in the early 20^th century and so on which do not exactly reflect kindly on a country that prides itself of being at the vanguard of liberty. But that small criticism aside, this is still a very readable and very valuable defence of the principle of liberty which is all the more valuable considering the troubled times we live in. If you haven’t read anything by Grayling before I can think of worse places to start. Highly recommended.