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be respected.
    As well as a provision for freedom of speech, most guarantees of basic liberties have a right to privacy sitting uneasily alongside them. It recognises that the full truth about an individual’s life cannot be made public without crushing his or her autonomy. Under the pressure of exposure, his sense of who he was would change. He would become suspicious, fretful, harassed; he would be left exposed to gales of mockery and condemnation. In the interests of preventing a surveillance society, it is better that the state allows the citizen to live a lie. ‘If you’ve nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,’ say authoritarians. But everyone has something to hide, and if there isn’t a dirty secret, there is always something that your enemies can twist to make you look dirty.
    Privacy was meant to offer the citizen protection against the over-mighty state. The emphasis on the right to a private life was an understandable and necessary reaction against the informers and spies the communist and fascist totalitarian regimes recruited to monitor daily life. But in the late twentieth century, at the same time as the Satanic Verses controversy began, judges began to adapt the law. Instead of stopping the secret service from tapping the phones or opening the mail of citizens, judges decided to stop the media revealing details of the private lives of wealthy celebrities and other public figures.
    The privacy law they developed could not have been more different from traditional libel law. Libel is meant to protect the individual from the pain inflicted by malicious gossips who spread lies about him or her. Privacy protects against the pain that comes from hearing the truth broadcast. In libel, truth is an absolute defence. If writers and publishers can justify what they say, they may leave the court without punishment. In privacy cases, truth is not a defence but an irrelevance. The law intervenes not because the reports are false, but because they tell too much truth for the subject to cope with, and open him up to mockery, to pain … to disrespect. Privacy rights allowed the wealthy to suppress criticisms, even though the criticisms were true. They could demand respect, even though they were not respectable.
    The persecution of Rushdie appeared to follow the old precedents. Contemporaries looking for a parallel to Khomeini’s gangsterish order for assassins to ‘hit’ him recalled the Vatican’s order to take out Elizabeth I in the 1570s. They talked about the re-emergence of the Inquisition, or quoted Voltaire’s pointed question, ‘What to say to a man who tells you he prefers to obey God than to obey men, and who is consequently sure of entering the gates of Heaven by slitting your throat?’
    The comparison with the past fails, because there is an unbridgeable gulf between today’s religion and the religious ideas which persisted for most of history. Until the Enlightenment, maybe until the publication of On the Origin of Species , believers could reassure themselves that the wisest thinkers of their time believed that a divine order structured the universe. As late as the 1690s, a belief in science and magic could co-exist even in the great mind of Isaac Newton, who divided his days between trying to understand the laws of motion and trying to work out when the Book of Revelation foretold the ‘great tribulation and the end of the world’. (He thought that God would wind us up in 2060, readers expecting to make it through the mid-twenty-first century should note.)
    Charges of blasphemy and heresy were once like accusations of libel. The wretched sinner had sought to spread falsehoods against the true religion, which the faithful exposed. The Protestant divines of Elizabethan England and the papacy that confronted them fought over what kind of supernatural power ordered the world. But they agreed on the fundamental question that a supernatural power must order the world. The Catholic believed that if