Can its suppression of speech endanger a government?
Any Western visitor to Central Asia is struck by the strictures on speech. Newspapers must obtain licenses, and opposition journalists live in fear of physical abuse from whatever source. In late June, two journalists protesting censorship in Uzbekistan were arrested and fined for trying to launch a hunger strike outside of the president’s residence, reported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is financed by the United States government.
Ironically, restraints on speech can destabilize a government. The English economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill explained why, in his 1859 essay “On liberty.”
Mill begins with a passing note that must jolt modern readers. “The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defense would be necessary of the ‘liberty of the press’ as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical governments.” Evidently, Mill had never been to Central Asia.
Taking as given that free speech weakens tyrants, Mill addresses what he sees as the modern problem: That a society may suppress certain ideas. Such censorship is at the bidding, not of the dictator, but of the democracy. Mill condemns this censorship as strongly as the other. “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind….
“If the opinion is right, [people] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
Suppose that the suppressed opinion is right. Its suppressors “have no authority to decide the question for all mankind,” for they are not infallible. Politicians should not think themselves infallible when even a wise leader like Marcus Aurelius wound up persecuting the Christians.
Society may repress an opinion because it does not fit the popular ideas of the day. “Yet it is…evident in itself…that ages are no more infallible than individuals.” Today’s popular ideas may be wrong, but men may censor themselves out of fear of social intolerance. “The price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind…. No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.”
Does censorship make sense?
Mill entertains a counter-argument: We all recognize that governments sometimes levy bad taxes or wage unjust wars. But we don’t argue that governments therefore should levy no taxes, wage no wars. So why should we deny them the right to censor opinion?
Mill answers that censorship is the most serious offense that a government can inflict on a society. “Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity are considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable.” Consider the Reformation, the classical period of Voltaire in the late 18th century, and the period of Goethe in Germany around the turn of the 19th century. “All three impulses are well nigh spent.”
When we unanimously agree in a belief -– such as a religious precept, or the sanctity of a presidency -– it ceases to be real to us, because we no longer discuss it. “The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.” As time passes, we will agree about more ideas, but these will no longer be alive for us. The ideas of capitalism are more vivid to the residents of Kazakhstan today, where they are daily debated, than they are to Americans.
We must permit expression of all ideas, because otherwise we cannot ascertain the truth of our own opinions. “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action.” When we censor opinions, we can no longer assume the truth of the permitted opinion, because it is not subject to correction. “Why is it…that there is on the whole a preponderance among mankind of rational opinions and rational conduct? If there really is this preponderance -– which there must be unless human affairs are, and have always been, in an almost desperate state -– it is owing to a quality of the human mind, the source of everything respectable in a man either as an intellectual or as a moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible.” Acts of censorship are “exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity.”
It is not enough to learn dissenting views from one’s teachers: “He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.” The Catholic Church used to permit its priests to read heretical books, in order to correct their views; but it would deny ordinary Catholics access to those books.
The truth, the whole truth, and something but the truth
In Central Asia, some politicians in power have argued that the government should not permit opposition newspapers to charge that the government silences dissidents. In Mill’s analysis, if we censor that opinion, then we can no longer accept that the government does not suppress dissidents, because this opinion can no longer be corrected. Moreover, if the opposition’s view is wrong, then censorship provides no way to correct it; and so it will always fester. Mainstream politicians should appeal to facts, not to the censor.
We rarely know the whole truth. “Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.” Often the heretical opinion holds a piece of missing truth. “Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.”
In short, Mill argues that we shouldn’t censor an opinion, because it may be true; even if it is mainly wrong, it may be partly true; and even if the received opinion is wholly true, it will lose its meaning unless we continue to dispute it. Friend Caroline Fox explained that Mill “lays in one as a tremendous duty to get oneself well contradicted, and admit always a devil’s advocate into the presence of your dearest, most sacred Truths, as they are apt to grow windy and worthless without such tests, if indeed they can stand the shock of argument at all.”
A modern economist might add a practical point: When the government suppresses free speech, then it signals potential foreign investors that it is too fragile to withstand robust debate. Investors seeking political stability may sidle out through the back door. -– Leon Taylor, tayloralmaty@gmail.com
Good reading
John Stuart Mill. On liberty. Republished in Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, The utilitarians. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press. 1973 [1859]. Online at http://www.constitution.org/jsm/liberty.htm
Richard Reeves. John Stuart Mill: Victorian firebrand. London: Atlantic Books. 2007. Chapter 11 discusses “On liberty” and is the source of the Caroline Fox quote above (page 274).
References
Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty. Second Uzbek journalist ends hunger strike. July 15, 2011. www.rferl.org
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