Free Speech and Conscience
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Free Speech and Conscience’
Though Arthur Clough had discovered that to be your own man was a long and toilsome path, it was not a path without hope.
In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned a desirable Fellowship at Oxford owing to his doubts about the Church of England. Shortly afterwards he was appointed Principal of University Hall in London, an ecumenical and supposedly more open-minded institution, but here too Clough found he was expected to think as his new colleagues did. Lonely, silent and depressed, he nevertheless clung on to hope.
Fiery young attorney Thomas Erskine stood up in the House of Commons to denounce a bill aiming to silence critics of the Government.
In December 1795, the Seditious Assemblies Act was passed in Westminster. Aimed at snuffing out sympathy for the French Revolution, the Act banned critics of the King, the Constitution or even Government policy from airing their views in public without prior permission. William Belsham recorded that crusading lawyer Thomas Erskine, MP for Portsmouth, had reacted angrily at this travesty of English liberties.
Those in Power may imagine that a docile and compliant public makes Government run more smoothly, but a society of that kind just won’t move forward.
John Stuart Mill was a firm believer in individual freedom, a conviction which led him to dissent from then-fashionable economic and social policy on women’s rights and American slavery. In On Liberty (1858), he warned politicians that a docile, on-message public might let the engine of State run more smoothly, but it will also rob it of any power to move forward.
Even where freedom of speech and conscience are not curtailed by law, there is another kind of censorship that is just as destructive to progress.
In the 1850s, those who held opinions felt by Authority to be untrue, antisocial or extreme were still being frozen out of academic, political and commercial roles, not by law so much as by denying them preferments or a public platform. John Stuart Mill warned that such censorship would not silence dissent, but would nurture a generation so feeble-minded that progress itself would be slowed to a crawl.
Abusive language, straw-man arguments and downright ‘fake news’ should have no place in civilised debate, but censoring them is far worse.
Addressing the issue of freedom of speech, John Stuart Mill turned his attention in On Liberty to the use of uncivil discourse and what we now call ‘fake news’. He admitted both were disagreeable and even dangerous, but felt that no action should be taken to police them. Such action makes the Establishment into judge, jury and executioner, and honest dissent is declared a sign of bad or even criminal character.
John Stuart Mill set out three kinds of liberty essential to a truly free society: freedom of conscience, of tastes, and of association.
In his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill has been talking about the proper role of Government, arguing that the State authorities should not meddle in the lives of individual citizens. He now lays out three freedoms essential to any truly liberal society: those of thought, choice and association. Every man should have the freedom to go his own way in life, so long as he extends the same courtesy to his neighbours.