In the ancient world, slavery was justified on the grounds of slaves' ignorance, poor physical development and untrustworthiness. These were caused by slavery, but they were hard facts in the face of the relative abstraction of long-term and general causality, and these hard facts justified the system for at least the thousand years we know about. As a practical matter, rights are very difficult to establish — or re-establish — because the results of oppression create their own rationale for keeping things just the way they are.

The dangers from Google to the free flow of information are obvious: the Chinese government's main partner in censorship is a scary candidate to be a monopolist in publishing. But the dangers extend to the creation of information — indeed, to the creation of all significant content. This publishing monopoly won't be motivated to sell books at all but rather to eat them. It will get more calories out of the books the more quickly it digests them, reducing their value to that of manure, or to nothing. It will get more calories from junk-food books, empty of thought and never demanding to be considered seriously and treated differently from each other. A special kind of book may evolve to meet Google's needs, a book with maximum hype on the outside and minimum cause for pause on the inside. It will be for all practical purposes an ad and Google's publishing venture will ingest itself, but not before the company directors have socked away enough cash to buy themselves a medium-sized tropical country and retire in peace, far from the wreck of the West.

Whew! I'm an author, so I'm used to equating my personal well-being with the fate of civilisation. But I never seriously expected my whining to have anything to do with the movement of history. Now, it just might. Perhaps for some of the same reasons, the next few months will be tantalising and exciting not only for me but for a lot of people who wouldn't look at my Aeneid if it bit them on the bottom.