Towards the Light
by A.C. Grayling
Bloomsbury, HK$330
Benjamin Franklin, a wise man in many respects, once said, 'He who would put security before liberty deserves neither.' It is a comment worth bearing in mind as the age of liberty, an age that lasted 500 years, draws to a close and the rights individuals fought and died to obtain are, with scarcely a murmur, stripped away.
British philosopher A.C. Grayling, who last considered human folly in Among the Dead Cities, which examined whether the deliberate destruction of German cities during the second world war constituted a war crime, turns to the question of what sets western civilisation apart from others.
Towards the Light - The Story of the Struggles for Liberty & Rights That Made the Modern West is a noble book, laying out with scholarly authority a beautifully argued case for all of us to stop and think about what we are allowing our governments to do in the name of the greater good. Before surrendering even a single right, no matter how anachronistic it may seem in the context of the war on terrorism, Grayling urges we think about why that particular right was deemed necessary in the first place, and the decades of fighting often needed to secure it.
'Today's leaders have grown up taking those freedoms and rights for granted, and are demonstrably not much interested in them any more; they find them an inconvenience because protecting them requires lengthier and costlier measures than they care to sanction,' Grayling says. 'Alas, most of the general population either seem to share their indifference, or are merely ignorant of what is in the process being lost.'
