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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus |
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THE NEW ENLIGHTENMENT
And the Fight to Free Knowledge
In The New Enlightenment, MIT Open Learning's Peter B. Kaufman describes the powerful forces that have purposely crippled our efforts to share knowledge widely and freely.
Popes and their inquisitors, emperors and their hangmen, commissars and their secret police - throughout history, all have sought to stanch freedom of information throughout time, all in the name of some spurious greater good. Kaufman takes us on a tour of the battlefields of fights against the worst kinds of thought control. He writes of times when the Bible could not be translated - you'd be burned for trying; when dictionaries and encyclopedias of facts were forbidden; when literature and science and history books were censored (sometimes along with their authors), trashed, and pulped; and when efforts to develop public networks of television and radio were quashed by private industry and hopes were abandoned. In the 21st century, the enemies of free thought have taken on new and different guises - giant corporate behemoths, sprawling national security agencies, gutted regulatory commissions. Bereft of any real moral compass or sense of social responsibility, their work to surveil and control us are no less nefarious than their 16th, 18th, and 20th century predecessors'. They are all part of what Kaufman calls the hideous and overgrown Monsterverse.
The New Enlightenment maps out the opportunities we have to take to mobilize for the fight ahead of us.
Popes and their inquisitors, emperors and their hangmen, commissars and their secret police - throughout history, all have sought to stanch freedom of information throughout time, all in the name of some spurious greater good. Kaufman takes us on a tour of the battlefields of fights against the worst kinds of thought control. He writes of times when the Bible could not be translated - you'd be burned for trying; when dictionaries and encyclopedias of facts were forbidden; when literature and science and history books were censored (sometimes along with their authors), trashed, and pulped; and when efforts to develop public networks of television and radio were quashed by private industry and hopes were abandoned. In the 21st century, the enemies of free thought have taken on new and different guises - giant corporate behemoths, sprawling national security agencies, gutted regulatory commissions. Bereft of any real moral compass or sense of social responsibility, their work to surveil and control us are no less nefarious than their 16th, 18th, and 20th century predecessors'. They are all part of what Kaufman calls the hideous and overgrown Monsterverse.
The New Enlightenment maps out the opportunities we have to take to mobilize for the fight ahead of us.
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Book
Published 2021-02-01 by Seven Stories Press |