Courting the Abyss

"Peters has written an interesting and provocative book. . . . Courting the Abyss is about free speech generally, but it focuses on this suggestion that we all become better people through tolerating the most hateful and diabolical speech, by staring at and listening to the Nazis and the racists in our midst. Peters is interested particularly in the expression of a Stoic sense of virtue and self-mastery in the free-speech position. The civil libertarian says: I am sufficiently in control of myself to look on the Nazis without contamination. I will not be brought down to their level. By staring at their swastikas and paying attention to their slogans, I grow and become a better person. Indeed, we all become better people and our society becomes a better society with this ability to look unflinchingly into the abyss of racial hatred. Peters's book is a story of 'abyss-artists', who put their evil on public display, and 'abyss-redeemers', who believe in a moral alchemy that can make virtue out of our gaze into hell. (Abyss-avoiders, on the other hand, are those who recoil from the display and either shield their own and others' eyes or at least demand a better reason for 'defending to the death' the Nazis' right to march through Skokie.) Abyss-redemption, he says, is a major and neglected theme in the history of liberal thought. . . . Peters has, I think, done us a service in pursuing this idea of abyss-redemption. I don't mean he commends it to us: he does not. But he rightly observes that we had better come to terms with it if we want to understand what is really going on, what has been going on for centuries, in free-speech debates. More than that, Courting the Abyss explores a number of connections between abyss-redemption as used specifically in this context, and other areas of life and culture where it is said that we are the better for gazing unflinchingly at sin or death or evil."--Jeremy Waldron "London Review of Books " "Witty, irreverent, and intellectually daring: John Durham Peters has written the best scholarly book on freedom of speech in more than a generation. He shows us how and why we should doubt simple-minded orthodoxy of every kind. A master wordsmith with a wonderful brain, Peters writes against hubris, even the hubris of free speech." -- (12/22/2004) `"Free speech is not only under attack, it is misunderstood. The political tradition that once sustained it is fading, and its very defenders often undermine it by making a spectacle of their own tolerance. In this context, John Durham Peters's judicious tracing of both the free speech tradition and the moral and intellectual challenges it faces is very welcome. Courting the Abyss is an eloquent plea for more careful thought and a wise analysis of our predicament. It is not entirely reassuring, but it is eminently valuable."-- (12/22/2004) "In Courting the Abyss, John Durham Peters pokes some serious fun at free-speech purists--he calls them 'abyss-artists'--who seek occasions to 'show off the advanced state of their self-mastery' by defending doctrines they loathe. The civilized, he observes, 'take pride in their ability to entertain abominations' and rarely consider that the abominations they entertain may be doing real, and bad, work. Peters names it as our task to 'find ways to sustain openness and other-mindedness' independently of the 'cult of toughness' and without ignoring the genuine risks. A wide-ranging and exhilarating re-opening of an old but ever-renewed question."-- (12/22/2004)