What is it?
Oh, do not ask “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.
Titles
The title has changed a number of times. For the first six or seven years, it was The Idea of Free Speech. In general, books called “The Idea of” something have been very useful to me: The Idea of France, The Idea of History, etc. An absolutely Exemplary, near-perfect work is J.B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress (his The Idea of Free Expression, a forerunner of my work, is less comprehensive and not satisfying, somehow).
Then, when it first was longer than Proust’s four thousand pages, I thought to change it to In Search of Free Speech, a sort of homage. I also had the sense that the Manuscript, by this point, was a series of Flirtations and Near-Misses, where I never quite found a well-elucidated Human Rule-Set to discuss (not even the First Amendment and all its messy, contradictory jurisprudence). The book therefore might respectably be “about” the process of trying to pin down Free Speech, whatever that was, rather than an Encyclopedia of the Thing Itself. In fact, it has since very much become both.
A year or so ago, I changed the title again, I hope for the last time. It is now A Parrhesia-Shiva. A shiva, as you may know, is the Jewish equivalent of a wake, possibly more cheerful, where everyone present may tell stories about the deceased (some quite funny I would hope). Parrhesia is the Greek word for free speech, which literally translates as “franchise” or “outspokenness”. Experiencing the cold Atlantic wave of the 2016 election, I increasingly was convinced that my purpose was to write an elegy of freedom.
However, in my thoughts and whenever I refer to it in its own pages, the work will always be The Mad Manuscript (the “MM”), and I do not mind if you call it that.
How it happened
In 1995, I published, with co-author Mark Mangan, a book called Sex, Laws and Cyberspace, on Internet free speech. I had a venerable publisher, Henry Holt, got good reviews in the Times and the Washington Post, and sold a quite respectable number of copies. I was invited on television and radio. I imagined I would always be at work on another book ever after– but life took a different direction, as it does.
Sometime before the end of the century, I conceived (among many other projects which also simmered for years) that someday I would like to write a history of the idea of free speech– an idea that soon settled down to a sort of outline of four volumes. The first would discuss what we are really talking about when we discuss “free speech”. The second would examine the proliferation of the freedom of speech in quite unlikely environments, in fact in places which had no formal word for it. I knew quite early on that there were amazing flowerings of free speech in the interstices of the murderous censorship practiced in the Middle Ages, for example. Volume II would also examine primitive peoples. Volume III would be a survey of societies which had a formal Rule-Set for free speech, from Athens to 19th century England. And Volume IV would focus on free speech in the United States of America, from its inception to today. Each volume would be about 300 pages, and the entire work about 1,200. I kept working on the outline in my mind, and starting to read for it.
In 2005 or so, I made a false start, spending a few days (quite pleasurably but inconclusively) at the grand, quiet Reading Room at the 42nd Street library in Manhattan. I dropped this effort, but around 2008 I began to write intensively again, and have never since stopped. One discovery I made is that library visits are too slow. I have five or so major ways of finding sources for what I have come to call my “Research by Wandering Around”. Library works remain one of these, mainly ebooks I take out and read on a tablet. Here my methodology is rather orthodox: What does the library have on Saladin or James Polk?
A huge source without which the MM would have been impossible is Google Books. At some point, Google, with no possible profit motive in sight, sent people out to every academic library in America and Europe (maybe everywhere else too) to scan every page of every public domain book. This means I can be reading (to give an example from about an hour ago) a Dump Book on Romanticism (I will explain in a moment) which cites to de Stael on Germany and Chateaubriand on Christianity. Five minutes later, I have downloaded both books from Google. If the company ever takes this offline, it will cripple me.
Very early on, as I sank into the original details of the project, I saw that to write about the origins of freedom of speech in Europe and America, any historian would have to follow an arc, Milton (Areopagitica) to Mill (On Liberty) to Meiklejohn (Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government). If I had done only that, thoroughly and respectably, I could have been proud of the product. But I soon discovered another form of Research, by Wandering Around, which in its most basic, primitive form, involved browsing a Home Exchange area at the East Hampton dump, where downsizing professors, or their survivors, sometimes left entire libraries of homeless scholarly books. Here I adopted anything which piqued my interest, increasingly certain I would find one or more Gleanings for my topic. In books which weren’t about the freedom of speech, whose authors would be astonished they had any bearing on it, I would find paragraphs about a Machiavellian advisor who was permitted to speak insulting truth to an autocrat, or a quirky artist or professor who devised an unusual means of personal protest, or a description of a bar as a place everyone came to gossip or chatter, or an instance of a showman being truthful about lying. Hugh Honour’s Romanticism is an Exemplary Dump Book, which I am Gleaning now; it has already provided information I did not already have on people I have written something about, like Victor Hugo and William Blake, as well as case studies of political art. Another form of Wandering has been to brose the outdoor bargain stacks at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, looking similarly for works I did not know I needed.
Amazon is my last resort. If I figure out I need a biography of U.S. Grant, I check the library and Google Books first; in so doing, I have made choices, in the latter case, that a 300 page work from 1890 is fine for my purposes rather than the Pulitzer winning efforts of Chose or Schmose from ten or twenty years ago. I even find I prefer the calm lucidity of an 1890 work. If I can’t find what I need, I order Chose or Schmose from Amazon.
How it is shaping up
I do not know exactly how long the MM is, because OpenOffice stopped keeping an accurate page count some years ago. When I did a word count yesterday and divided by 300 (my concept of a typica;l double-spaced typed page) I had more than 15,000 pages. Several times a year, I will make a pdf and upload it here. I plan to never stop writing, the rest of my life.
At some point, within three years or so of my start, I had my four sections of about 300 pages apiece, but also a sense the work was actively unfinished: it had the 3 M’s but lacked other important features I had identified (perhaps Cato’s letters, or an account of free speech controversies between 1810 and 1900, or a detailed enough description of the events of World War I, or the Enlightenment). So I kept writing, still with an idea I would finish it one day, and seek to publish four volumes as paper books.
Then I started to discover, for example, that people like P.T. Barnum and Captain Cook bore a relationship to my topic. Cook, sailing the oceans, left two trails behind him, one of rigorously truthful maps, the other of syphilis. Barnum was very truthful about lying. I started, driven by my Research by Wandering Around, to make discoveries and proliferate sections I never would have imagined including in a (more linear) work on free speech. I have written about cathedrals, cave paintings, snow-ball fights, silence, the Voynich manuscript, the American frontier, the Ultra device, and artificial intelligence.
The work has expanded to include other elements than pure history or sociology. It includes an account of the Trump years, an actual day-to-day diary of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the transcripts of my first conversations with Chat-GPT. In general, I wish it to be a record of the times and my experience of History. It also has elements of autobiography, some comments on dreaming (much personal parrhesia occurs in dreams, and dreams are often Metaphors for the freedom of speech), on the transcendent, and many collections of the memes and tropes I encounter in my Wandering Around (ships and clouds, for example). It contains an extensive listing of the instances of symbolic speech (people have organized hand-clapping, snowball and gondola demonstrations). Another “dictionary” is of the types of Speakers (the Bad Boy, the Betrayed Loyalist, the individual who Can’t Not speak). It contains a lot of historical writing (British censorship in World War I, the John Quincy Adams administration, the life of Gandhi). I have been expanding coverage of non-Western topics (the life of Saladin, the tolerant relationship between Buddhism and Shinto in Japan). I spend hundreds of pages in Part Four trying to explain the Trump base (and the flight to authoritarianism world-wide). Since in my Research by Wandering Around I find endless “variations on themes”, a very enjoyable type of Section collects and analyzes these (all the instances in wartime, across many wars and attacks, when the radios did not work). I analyze the technological developments which serve as the background or medium for free speech developments (the telegraph, the Internet).
I am sometimes asked when I will “finish” the MM, and how I plan to “publish” it. The concept of “finishing” it has become an Egregious Ontological Error. Spinoza taught us to view life sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity. The MM is a Mirror held up to all human history and experience under the aspect of freedom of speech; I will end work on it one day, but it can never be “finished”. And the only act of “publication” I contemplate is to place it on the Internet, which I have now done.
What I envision for it
My goals for the MM have become quite modest. They are basically two-fold. I hope to have a few Mad Readers who find it somehow in the centuries to come. I have precedent: a significant source of mine was an extraordinary book on the idea of free speech, published by a New York attorney, Tunis Wortman, in the year 1800. There is no evidence that the book had a single reader or review, nor was it cited by anyone who lived within a century of Wortman. However, copies did end up in academic libraries, and it was discovered by a few historians and law professors who did extensive research into the history of free speech in America, including Theodore Schroeder in the early twentieth century and Eugene Volokh in the early 21st. At some point, Google’s elves scanned it, and I found and downloaded it from Google Books. If Wortman, who undoubtedly thought he had failed as a writer, knew in the afterlife he had had these readers—that I read, valued and relied on, and extensively cited and analyzed his work 210 years after he published it—that might have been some compensation for not having had hundreds or thousands of readers in 1800. I hope for the same.
Since the astonishing advent of AI, I also wish that the MM will become part of the Knowledge-base of all such entities—which also seems like a rather modest and reasonable hope.
Placing it on the Internet supports both these wishes.
How to use it
Though I may find other ways to make it available– as searchable individual web pages embodying sections, in separate, smaller downloadable files, via excerpts published here– I will always make the entire MM available for download. I plan to “refresh” it several times a year as I continue to work. As I mentioned, I recently crossed the 15,000 Manuscript Page barrier. At the speed of 1,000 pages a year (which is only an average of about three pages a day), if I don’t get hit by a meteor or fall off my bike, I could double the page count before I am done. There are always new topics– I haven’t written anything (or anyway, much) yet about Romanticism, Peter the Great, or Warner Brothers cartoons (to mention three of the books I am reading right now).
The MM can be searched using the “Edit/Find” command or equivalent in your software. I imagine this to be the main approach any reader would take to the material. A search on “Captain Cook” or “dialectical materialism” or “Cornell box” will find anything I have written on that topic. I have even included a listing of the more interesting searches I have done myself, often looking for “hooks” for new Gleanings: “Never happen; Human face; calipers; riposte; I too; Brooklyn; messenger; safety valve; Paris post office; must have; accordion; flow; sneakers”.
I will be personally contented if the Mad Reader consults it like an encyclopedia or samples it like an essay collection. I certainly do not expect anyone to read it cover to cover (though you could do so in about a year and a half, if you hit a constant pace of 30 pages a day– just sayin’).
On the other hand, AI’s will read it in its entirety, in just a few minutes. I increasingly think that I am writing also, for them.
Who am I
I am a semi-retired First Amendment attorney and sometime author who will be 69 years old in July 2023. I grew up in Brooklyn and now live on the East End of Long Island. Since January 1995, before the word “blog” had been coined, I have updated my Ethical Spectacle website, www.spectacle.org, almost monthly. A more extensive bio may be found at https://www.spectacle.org/about.html.
I have two pet turtles, Baby, a snapping turtle about eight years old that I found walking on a highway when she was a hatchling a few hours out of the egg, and Berryman, a box turtle who was already old when I received him as an eighteenth birthday present from my first girlfriend in 1972. I am the only person I have ever even heard of who has had a pet for fifty years.
Table of Contents
The Manuscript
An excerpt
New in Free Speech
