I think you've done a great job of outlining the historical understanding or writing. But as a writer, I don't take much solace in your belief in the power of 'writing.'
“Writing becomes a societal threat precisely because it disturbs an established order—because it allows for the introduction of dissenting viewpoints.” But not if it can’t get published. Modern censors don’t bann books. They ‘decline’ them when they’re offered and the dissenting viewpoints in them are buried in the glut of poor work that is currently ‘self-published.’ Only the vetted shiny new propaganda of feminism, LGBTQ, BIPOC and rebranded communist manifesto junk gets published and, more importantly, promoted.
“Derrida… sees writing more as an excuse to topple the “Western metaphysical tradition” than as a way to promote freedom…” Never heard of Derrida, never read him, but he seems to be right on point. Isn’t this exactly what had happened in the last fifty or so years? Hasn’t ‘Western… tradition been toppled?
“Writing is the best tool we have to continue to uphold a free, democratic society that allows each individual member to attempt to make sense of the universe through creativity, and, in so doing, disseminate his or her viewpoint. Writing is the antithesis of a totalitarian order because it allows dissent—and anyone literate can write and read.” I DON'T THINK SO. 'Writing doesn't allow dissent; the State allows dissent, or doesn't. And It depends on ‘who’ is writing and what she is writing. If the State does not sanction what she is writing, it is ‘NOT made available to the populace.
““Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.” AND where is our freedom of thought? Aren’t we on the way to NO FREEDOM of thought? We have young people coming out of our universities who do not know how to think! When something must be puzzled out, ‘thought’ about, they raise their little magic mirrors for the answers. Look at these people scratching cars and shouting at people who ‘think’ differently from them. Where is the freedom of thought in these younger generations? How can any one who sees what is happening with young people believe that ‘freedom of thought’ (THROUGH A MULTITUDE OF WRITTEN OPINIONS) will survive more than another ten or twenty years?
“Public liberty, in other words, is based on both freedom of thought and freedom of speech” Well, we’re in dangerous times. I cannot wear a red cap with the letters MAGA on it—the wearing of that being speech—when there are hordes of young minds full of mush who feel entitled to rip it from my head and beat me half to death for having different THOUGHTS from them.
“we use writing to get to truth…” Really? You could say that we use cars to get to the next town. But if the State will not let you on the highway, what good is your car?
Where am I coming from, people will say. Well, I'm coming from the real world we're living in at the moment. As someone who cannot get a book published because of my world view, my POV, my race, my identity, my sex, my ability to write is as worthwhile as my vestigial tail.
Sorry to rain on the parade. But for the sake of a diversity of opinion, the bitter old man must be allowed his say every now and then. But only in a limited way.
I have several friends who are teachers at the high school and college level. They tell me that many of their students don't think learning to write is important. Many don't read enough to tell the difference between good writing and whatever ChatGPT regurgitated. One wonders whether these students will ever be able to express a complex, nuanced idea or critique a political argument.
Such a phenomenal and essential article for our times, Liza! I will admit when I first read it, I didn't understand what you were trying to say. But having read this reprint of it, I now understand what you were trying to convey here. You can't have a free society without the ability to express yourself using the written word and the freedom to do so openly. Having the ability to write is one of the key things that sets us apart from our primate cousins and the rest of the animal kingdom. The ideal form of human society is NOT the one Plato advocates for in the Republic but rather the one our founding fathers created for us. One where public dissent and being able to freely express dissenting viewpoints is allowed and encouraged. Without writing we can't see our thoughts and are thus unable to understand them. THIS is what makes writing and writers so crucially important for a free society.
We need to remember this important lesson you've reminded us of now more than ever, Liza. freedom of speech and expression are under attack all across the western world including here in the United States from the left, right and the oligarchy that runs our society: the government, the intelligence agencies, corporate America, and the military-industrial complex. In red states we're seeing book bans, drag queen storybook hour being banned, restrictions on protests, the BDS Movement (disgusting and unhelpful to peace as it may be) being banned, and drag performances are being targeted for censorship.
From the left, you've also got book bans as well as sensitivity readers, campus speech codes, policing of comedy, hate speech laws, deplatforming of folks on social media which happened to folks like Alex Jones, David Icke and even President Donald Trump, and Washington state's recent bias hotline bill which would've allowed the state to collect information on hate crimes and bias incidents (quite broad terms you've got there) and provide "support and compensation" to "victims of hate crimes." (Again, overly broad terms). The government and private companies are doing it too. Remember the 2001 PATRIOT Act? It hasn't gone anywhere. How about when Julian Assange was thrown in jail...for doing journalism and publishing shocking government secrets the public has every right to know about? The Oscar-winning documentary film No Other Land was banned from being streamed in the United States. Whatever you think of the film, is doing so the right way to combat antisemitism? No. Social media platforms can take you down for anything the Silicon Valley billionaires and their powerful allies don't like. This includes so-called "free speech hero" Elon Musk. Corporations can also impose gag orders on you if they don't like something you say about them in public.
Oh yes, don't forget that the intelligence agencies can spy on you. The NSA has been spying on American citizens for years now as well as foreign leaders and even Pope Francis. All these examples illustrate perfectly why in the United States in 2025, we need great writers now more than ever to bring dissenting viewpoints and ideas to the American public and the world. This is what makes Substack warts and all, so great! This is also why we need publications like Pens and Poison and The Black Sheep! Fearless individuals like Liza, Salome Sibonex, Jake Klein and many, many others are the backbone of what keeps American society discussing, debating and thinking which is essential for any free society and is a big reason why living in Communist societies like the USSR, Red China, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, North Korea, Cuba, North Vietnam, and Poland was so miserable and stifling to the human spirit and creativity! Literary giants like William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Edith Wharton, Theodor Geisel, James Joyce, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, J.D. Salinger, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Carlos Williams blessed us with a western literary tradition that exemplifies how public liberty enriches our worldview, broadens our minds and helps find objective truth which like most things in life in not black and white but found within the many shades of gray.
It's like that old Jewish saying from the Ethics of the Father: who is wise? He who learns from every man. I myself have learned so much and been helped to see truth in all its complexity by reading historians with a variety of different viewpoints and listening to and reading the work of thinkers from across the political spectrum. That would even include Communists, Socialists and Anarchists, anti-Zionists, and others with whom I disagree. Karl Marx was a horrible person and a racist, sexist, antisemite, and homophobe. As an aside, just look at the stuff he wrote in his letters and correspondence about blacks, Slavs, the Chinese, Mexicans, and Jews...it's not pretty and shows what massive bigot the father of Communism truly was. He and the old fashioned Dixiecrats of the 1950s would've got along swimmingly. Nonetheless, I learned from reading Marx the type of society we don't want and how idealism and trying to use totalitarianism in the name of a perfect world can go wrong. Not all opinions are valid, but all are valuable! Liza, this article seriously I know this is like the billionth time I've said it but I truly mean it, deserves the Pulitzer Prize and deserves to be entered into the Halls of Congress as historically significant!
Great post! I think I'll write a response to it on my own Substack. It's worth noting here, however, that back then the plays and poems of classical antiquity also functioned as entertainment and most probably would have been seen by the Ancient Greeks as such. But with the caveat that unlike today, their society was a society of geniuses and people thinking on a higher plane will certainly require entertainment that also functions on a higher plane.
I'm not a scholar of the Ancient Greek language so someone can correct me, but when referring to poetry Plato may well be referring to entertainment in general. And if he is, he's right that it can function just like the shadows in the cave. It functions that way today, with mass media. This is why Wokeism and its parent ideologies, Marxism and postmodernism, are so dangerous. They seek to shove us back into the cave while they take up the role as our shadow masters, but with the caveat that postmodernism pretends to do the opposite and is good at convincing people that it gives them the opposite. What it really gives is cynicism, an emotional drug that very comfortably allows us to think we know it all.
"I'm not a scholar of the Ancient Greek language so someone can correct me, but when referring to poetry Plato may well be referring to entertainment in general." Plato used the term poiesis, which literally means "production," from poie- "to make." However, it is clear from context that he was referring to poetry in the literary sense, as his examples are all poetic works. (Note that there might be musical accompaniment--that is why lyric poetry has that name, originally being accompanied by a lyre.) However, your general point is well-taken; Ancient Greek entertainment is usually said to have comprised many artistic activities like the theater, dance, and music, as well as athletics. On the other hand, the Iliad and Odyssey were basic to Greek education, hence Socrates discussing poetry in particular.
I think you've done a great job of outlining the historical understanding or writing. But as a writer, I don't take much solace in your belief in the power of 'writing.'
“Writing becomes a societal threat precisely because it disturbs an established order—because it allows for the introduction of dissenting viewpoints.” But not if it can’t get published. Modern censors don’t bann books. They ‘decline’ them when they’re offered and the dissenting viewpoints in them are buried in the glut of poor work that is currently ‘self-published.’ Only the vetted shiny new propaganda of feminism, LGBTQ, BIPOC and rebranded communist manifesto junk gets published and, more importantly, promoted.
“Derrida… sees writing more as an excuse to topple the “Western metaphysical tradition” than as a way to promote freedom…” Never heard of Derrida, never read him, but he seems to be right on point. Isn’t this exactly what had happened in the last fifty or so years? Hasn’t ‘Western… tradition been toppled?
“Writing is the best tool we have to continue to uphold a free, democratic society that allows each individual member to attempt to make sense of the universe through creativity, and, in so doing, disseminate his or her viewpoint. Writing is the antithesis of a totalitarian order because it allows dissent—and anyone literate can write and read.” I DON'T THINK SO. 'Writing doesn't allow dissent; the State allows dissent, or doesn't. And It depends on ‘who’ is writing and what she is writing. If the State does not sanction what she is writing, it is ‘NOT made available to the populace.
““Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.” AND where is our freedom of thought? Aren’t we on the way to NO FREEDOM of thought? We have young people coming out of our universities who do not know how to think! When something must be puzzled out, ‘thought’ about, they raise their little magic mirrors for the answers. Look at these people scratching cars and shouting at people who ‘think’ differently from them. Where is the freedom of thought in these younger generations? How can any one who sees what is happening with young people believe that ‘freedom of thought’ (THROUGH A MULTITUDE OF WRITTEN OPINIONS) will survive more than another ten or twenty years?
“Public liberty, in other words, is based on both freedom of thought and freedom of speech” Well, we’re in dangerous times. I cannot wear a red cap with the letters MAGA on it—the wearing of that being speech—when there are hordes of young minds full of mush who feel entitled to rip it from my head and beat me half to death for having different THOUGHTS from them.
“we use writing to get to truth…” Really? You could say that we use cars to get to the next town. But if the State will not let you on the highway, what good is your car?
Where am I coming from, people will say. Well, I'm coming from the real world we're living in at the moment. As someone who cannot get a book published because of my world view, my POV, my race, my identity, my sex, my ability to write is as worthwhile as my vestigial tail.
Sorry to rain on the parade. But for the sake of a diversity of opinion, the bitter old man must be allowed his say every now and then. But only in a limited way.
Have a good day.
I have several friends who are teachers at the high school and college level. They tell me that many of their students don't think learning to write is important. Many don't read enough to tell the difference between good writing and whatever ChatGPT regurgitated. One wonders whether these students will ever be able to express a complex, nuanced idea or critique a political argument.
Such a phenomenal and essential article for our times, Liza! I will admit when I first read it, I didn't understand what you were trying to say. But having read this reprint of it, I now understand what you were trying to convey here. You can't have a free society without the ability to express yourself using the written word and the freedom to do so openly. Having the ability to write is one of the key things that sets us apart from our primate cousins and the rest of the animal kingdom. The ideal form of human society is NOT the one Plato advocates for in the Republic but rather the one our founding fathers created for us. One where public dissent and being able to freely express dissenting viewpoints is allowed and encouraged. Without writing we can't see our thoughts and are thus unable to understand them. THIS is what makes writing and writers so crucially important for a free society.
We need to remember this important lesson you've reminded us of now more than ever, Liza. freedom of speech and expression are under attack all across the western world including here in the United States from the left, right and the oligarchy that runs our society: the government, the intelligence agencies, corporate America, and the military-industrial complex. In red states we're seeing book bans, drag queen storybook hour being banned, restrictions on protests, the BDS Movement (disgusting and unhelpful to peace as it may be) being banned, and drag performances are being targeted for censorship.
From the left, you've also got book bans as well as sensitivity readers, campus speech codes, policing of comedy, hate speech laws, deplatforming of folks on social media which happened to folks like Alex Jones, David Icke and even President Donald Trump, and Washington state's recent bias hotline bill which would've allowed the state to collect information on hate crimes and bias incidents (quite broad terms you've got there) and provide "support and compensation" to "victims of hate crimes." (Again, overly broad terms). The government and private companies are doing it too. Remember the 2001 PATRIOT Act? It hasn't gone anywhere. How about when Julian Assange was thrown in jail...for doing journalism and publishing shocking government secrets the public has every right to know about? The Oscar-winning documentary film No Other Land was banned from being streamed in the United States. Whatever you think of the film, is doing so the right way to combat antisemitism? No. Social media platforms can take you down for anything the Silicon Valley billionaires and their powerful allies don't like. This includes so-called "free speech hero" Elon Musk. Corporations can also impose gag orders on you if they don't like something you say about them in public.
Oh yes, don't forget that the intelligence agencies can spy on you. The NSA has been spying on American citizens for years now as well as foreign leaders and even Pope Francis. All these examples illustrate perfectly why in the United States in 2025, we need great writers now more than ever to bring dissenting viewpoints and ideas to the American public and the world. This is what makes Substack warts and all, so great! This is also why we need publications like Pens and Poison and The Black Sheep! Fearless individuals like Liza, Salome Sibonex, Jake Klein and many, many others are the backbone of what keeps American society discussing, debating and thinking which is essential for any free society and is a big reason why living in Communist societies like the USSR, Red China, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, North Korea, Cuba, North Vietnam, and Poland was so miserable and stifling to the human spirit and creativity! Literary giants like William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Edith Wharton, Theodor Geisel, James Joyce, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, J.D. Salinger, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Carlos Williams blessed us with a western literary tradition that exemplifies how public liberty enriches our worldview, broadens our minds and helps find objective truth which like most things in life in not black and white but found within the many shades of gray.
It's like that old Jewish saying from the Ethics of the Father: who is wise? He who learns from every man. I myself have learned so much and been helped to see truth in all its complexity by reading historians with a variety of different viewpoints and listening to and reading the work of thinkers from across the political spectrum. That would even include Communists, Socialists and Anarchists, anti-Zionists, and others with whom I disagree. Karl Marx was a horrible person and a racist, sexist, antisemite, and homophobe. As an aside, just look at the stuff he wrote in his letters and correspondence about blacks, Slavs, the Chinese, Mexicans, and Jews...it's not pretty and shows what massive bigot the father of Communism truly was. He and the old fashioned Dixiecrats of the 1950s would've got along swimmingly. Nonetheless, I learned from reading Marx the type of society we don't want and how idealism and trying to use totalitarianism in the name of a perfect world can go wrong. Not all opinions are valid, but all are valuable! Liza, this article seriously I know this is like the billionth time I've said it but I truly mean it, deserves the Pulitzer Prize and deserves to be entered into the Halls of Congress as historically significant!
Great post! I think I'll write a response to it on my own Substack. It's worth noting here, however, that back then the plays and poems of classical antiquity also functioned as entertainment and most probably would have been seen by the Ancient Greeks as such. But with the caveat that unlike today, their society was a society of geniuses and people thinking on a higher plane will certainly require entertainment that also functions on a higher plane.
I'm not a scholar of the Ancient Greek language so someone can correct me, but when referring to poetry Plato may well be referring to entertainment in general. And if he is, he's right that it can function just like the shadows in the cave. It functions that way today, with mass media. This is why Wokeism and its parent ideologies, Marxism and postmodernism, are so dangerous. They seek to shove us back into the cave while they take up the role as our shadow masters, but with the caveat that postmodernism pretends to do the opposite and is good at convincing people that it gives them the opposite. What it really gives is cynicism, an emotional drug that very comfortably allows us to think we know it all.
"I'm not a scholar of the Ancient Greek language so someone can correct me, but when referring to poetry Plato may well be referring to entertainment in general." Plato used the term poiesis, which literally means "production," from poie- "to make." However, it is clear from context that he was referring to poetry in the literary sense, as his examples are all poetic works. (Note that there might be musical accompaniment--that is why lyric poetry has that name, originally being accompanied by a lyre.) However, your general point is well-taken; Ancient Greek entertainment is usually said to have comprised many artistic activities like the theater, dance, and music, as well as athletics. On the other hand, the Iliad and Odyssey were basic to Greek education, hence Socrates discussing poetry in particular.
Terrific explanation of how writing even a shopping list is a reaction against authoritarianism.
Yes, and...YES.