WHAT MODERN
From our recent experience it is clear that the traditional liberties of speech and opinion rest on no solid foundation. At the time when the world needs above all other things the activity of generous imagination and the creative leadership of planning and inventive minds, our thinking is shriveled with panic. Time and energy that should go to building and restoring are instead consumed in warding off the pin-pricks of prejudice and fighting guerilla war against misunderstanding and intolerance. For suppression is felt, not simply by the scattered individuals who are actually suppressed. It reaches back into the steadiest mind, creating tensions everywhere; and the tension of fear produces sterility. Men cease to say what they think; and when they cease to say it, they soon cease to think it. They think in reference of their critics and not in reference to the facts. For when thought becomes socially hazardous, men spend more time wondering about the hazard then they do in developing their thought. Yet nothing is more certain than that mere bold resistance will not permanently liberate men’s mind. The problem is not only greater than that, but different, and the time is ripe for consideration. We have learned that many of the hard-won rights of man are utterly insecure. It may be that we cannot make them secure simply by imitating the earlier champions of liberty.
Something important about the human character was exposed by Plato when, with the spectacle of Socrates’s death before him he founded Utopia on a censorship stricter than any which exists on this heavily censored planet. His intolerance seems strange. But it is really the logical expression of an impulse that most of us have not the candor to recognize. It was the service of Plato to formulate the dispositions of men in the shape of ideals, and the surest things we can learn from him are not what we ought to do, but what we are inclined to do. We are peculiarly inclined to suppress whatever impugns the security of that to which we have given our allegiance. If our loyalty is turned to what exist, intolerance begins at its frontiers; if it is turned; as Plato’s was, to Utopia, we shall find Utopia defended with intolerance.
There are, so far as I can discover, no absolutists for liberty; I can recall no doctrine of liberty, which, under the acid test, does not become contingent upon some other ideal. There goal is never liberty, but liberty for something or other. For liberty is a condition under which activity takes place, and men’s interests attach themselves primarily to their activities and what is necessary to fulfill them, not to the abstract requirements of any activity that might be conceived.
And yet controversialists rarely take this into account. The battle is fought with banners on which are inscribed absolute and universal ideals. They are not absolute and universal in fact. No man has ever thought out an absolute or a universal ideal in politics, for the simple reason that nobody knows enough, to do it. We all use absolutes, because an ideal which seems to exist apart from time, space, and circumstances has a prestige that no candid avowal of special purpose can ever have. Looked at from one point of view universals are part of the fighting apparatus in men. What they desire enormously they easily come to call God’s will, or their nation’s purpose. Looked at genetically, these idealization are probably born in that spiritual reverie where all men live most of the time. In reverie there is neither time, space, nor particular reference, and hope is omnipotent. This omnipotence, which is denied to them in action, nevertheless illuminates activity with a sense of utter and irresistible value.
The classic doctrine of liberty consists of absolutes. It consists of them except at the critical points where the author has come in contact with objective difficulties. Then he introduces into the argument, somewhat furtively, a reservation which liquidates its universal meaning and reduces the exalted plea for liberty in general to a special argument for the success of a special purpose.
There are at the
present time, for instance, no more fervent champions of liberty than the
western sympathizers with the Russian Soviet government. Why is it that they
are indignant when Mr. Burleson suppresses a newspaper and complacent with when
Lenin does? And, vice versa, why is
it that the anti-Bolshevist force in the world are in favor of restricting
constitutional liberty as a preliminary to establishing genuine liberty in
If there were any men who believed in liberty apart from particular purposes, that man would be a hermit contemplating all existence with hopeful and neutral eye. For him, in the last analysis, there could be nothing worth resisting, nothing particularly worth defending, not even the rights of hermits to contemplate existence with a cold and neutral eye. He would be loyal simply to the possibilities which most seriously impair its variety and its health. No such man has yet counted in the history of politics. For what every theorist of liberty has meant is that certain types of behavior and classes of opinion hitherto regulated should be somewhat differently regulated in the future. What each seems to say is that the opinion and action should be free; that liberty is the highest and most sacred interest of life. But somewhere each of them inserts a weasel clause to the effect ‘of course’ the freedom granted shall not be employed too destructively. It is this clause which checks exuberance and remind us that, in spite of appearances, we are listening to finite men pleading a special cause.
Among the
English classics none are more representative than
“Yet if all cannon be part of one mind, as who looks they should be? This doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian that many be tolerated, rather than all compell’d.”
So much for the generalization. Now for the qualification which follows immediately upon it:
“I mean not tolerated Popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpats all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpat, provided first that all charitable and compassionat means be used to win and regain the weak and misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against the faith or manners no low can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw it self: but those neighboring differences, or rather indifferences, are what I speak of, whether in some point of doctrine or of discipline, which though they may be many, yet need no interrupt the unity of spirit, if we could but find among us the bond of peace.”
…
(Walter Lippman - Essay: “The Basic Problem of Democracy”; Ноември, 1919 год.)
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