Free Speech and Conscience
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Free Speech and Conscience’
In The Copybook
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Free Speech and Conscience’
In The Copybook
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The people who oil the wheels of society are not the people who never give offence, they are the people who never take any.
There are those, said American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who feel they can never really open up, even among their friends, for fear of offending someone. Better, he advised, to choose more robust and sympathetic listeners for your little circle. The hero of an open and accepting society is not the man who never gives offence; it is the man who never takes any.
RL Stevenson was of the opinion that wrongthink was better than groupthink.
In Crabbed Age and Youth, Robert Louis Stevenson argued that we should not try to silence the opinions of the young, however foolish they may seem. He did not pretend that the young are wise and pioneering thinkers. He thought they were mostly thinking nonsense. But it was better to come up with bad answers to good questions than to ask no questions at all.
A US Congressman tells the House why they mustn’t censor the press.
In July 1798, the Government of American President John Adams laid a Bill before Congress designed to criminalise criticism in the press. Censorship of this kind was all too familiar in England, then as now, but the debate in the US House of Representatives deserves careful reading, if only for the magnificent principle here laid down by Edward Livingston, Congressman for New York’s 2nd District.
Clever people have realised that it is easier to get people on your side by mockery than by persuasion.
William Paley complained that critics of Christianity no longer troubled themselves with civilised debate. Instead, they scattered sniggering remarks throughout popular and academic literature, in the hope of laughing the public into atheism; for their knowledge of human nature had taught them that scorn is far more persuasive than argument.
Taking the trouble to express ourselves more clearly helps us to think more clearly too.
In 1783, after serving for twenty-one years as Edinburgh University’s first Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Hugh Blair retired, and immediately published a collection of his lectures. No. XII dealt with the structure of sentences, and urged readers to take time over their sentence-making because disciplined writers make more disciplined thinkers.
However loud his critics shouted their disapproval, Abraham Lincoln would neither deprive them of free speech nor change his opinions.
In 1864, as the American Civil War progressed, talk in Washington had turned to how rebellious Confederate States ought to be handled should the Union win. President Lincoln’s appeals for reconciliation were brushed aside by supporters of the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill, a cock-a-doodle-do of victory designed to give Washington sweeping powers.
Pliny admired Julius Mauricus because he spoke his mind, and Emperor Nerva because he let him.
Rome welcomed gentle Nerva (r. 96-98) with relief following the death of Emperor Domitian, who — thanks to hangers-on such as Fabricius Veiento, and the feared spymaster Catullus Messalinus — had maintained a vicious police state. Pliny’s friend Julius Mauricus had lost his brother in one of Domitian’s purges, but he was still speaking his mind.