Book review: Liberty in the Age of Terror

Published on Friday 19 June 2009 18:28

LIBERTY IN THE AGE OF TERROR AC Grayling Bloomsbury £12.99 MARC LAMBERT

FRANCIS Coppola's brilliant early film, The Conversation, concerns a surveillance expert destroyed by the gradual realisation that the true victim of the covert systems he has devised is none other than himself.

The film ironises a key American credo: that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And it asks, whose liberty, and at what price? Who watches the watchmen?

The parallels with our post-9/11 world are startling. Here the erosion of civil rights in the name of security and liberty pose exactly the same dilemmas. With one big difference – not many people seem to care. Certainly not Parliament, asserts Grayling, arguably Britain's most eminent publicly engaged philosopher. Since 1997 it has passed no fewer than 19 Acts and Orders which should give us serious concern, chief among these the Terrorism Act of 2000. These give the government powers to listen to our conversations real and virtual, to imprison us for long periods without trial, and to collect a vast array of personal detail without accountability, from DNA samples to bank transactions.

As counterblast to our indolence, Grayling quotes Benjamin Franklin: "Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one." Reaching back to the Enlightenment, he reasserts the values and rights it won for us.

But he also tussles with the concept of individual liberty within the collective, while making some controversial claims. Multicultural pluralism in Britain is dead, he argues, because our notions of personal identity are all wrong. Instead of understanding ourselves as bearers of multiple identities, we have ghettoised ourselves as one thing: Christian, Muslim, Jew and so on. The failure is both of government and uncertain civic culture.

Despite the great importance of its subject, Grayling's book has a hurried, incomplete feel to it. It lacks fluency and uncomfortably compresses complicated arguments. To bulk it out, he has added brief sections on thinkers he both admires and despises, from Isaiah Berlin to Slavoj Zizek, doing both them and us a considerable disservice. Grayling argues, rightly, that liberty and its discontents is the central issue of our age. But he could have done better than this.