When Truth is Suppressed
Whatever Happened to "Sticks and Stones..."?
This is Part 2 of a four-pert series about the loss of freedom of speech in America. In Part 1, I noted that this previously unimaginable sea change in our national ethos has been largely (if not entirely) predicated on the assertion that free speech presents a great danger to our society and there is a critical need to establish a censorship regime to “keep us all safe”. I argued that this is a disingenuous claim, a smoke screen laid down by a powerful elite seeking to obscure their true motivation and intent. The only people threatened by free speech are those whose nefarious works are being exposed by it. The true goal of our shiny new censorship regime is to suppress the counter-attack that is exposing a generation of misgovernment by entitled elites. The democratization of speech resulting from recent information technology advances has upset the previous arrangement, and the empire is striking back.
While it would be good to explore the censors’ ulterior motives, my intent here is to expose the vacuousness of their claim that there is a clear and present danger in the world that can best be met by sacrificing the most fundamental of our freedoms. I’m not ready to believe that we no longer value freedom in this storied republic, so I cling to the hope that the public’s acquiescence is rather an indication that the argument of the censors has hit home, that people genuinely believe that a situation has developed wherein suppression of speech in some form and to some degree is necessary for the good of society. Let’s examine that argument, then, with the help of John Stuart Mill, whose treatment of the question in Chapter 2 of On Liberty demonstrates conclusively that suppression of speech is harmful to society in all conceivable circumstances.
An Illegitimate Power
As I noted in Part 1, Mill divides the question into three possible cases that are mutually exclusive and exhaustive. Every act of censorship must fall into one and only one of the three categories. The first of these, wherein the opinion to be suppressed is true, is the subject of this post. But Mill makes a general observation that is of critical significance before addressing either of these divisions. After noting that even though the law in England on the subject of the press “is as servile to this day as it was in the time of the Tudors”, he asserts that no argument is needed against the executive or the legislature seeking to suppress the expression of opinion, so settled is the consensus against this. This he says of Victorian England, where there is not only no First Amendment, but no written Constitution to be amended. But he is quick to add a qualifying condition: “Except when in doing so [suppressing speech] it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public.” Substitute fear for intolerance, and I think we can say he’s describing the situation in 21st century America. We’re all in grave danger, the argument goes, so it’s no time to quibble about rights.
But even supposing, Mill argues, that the government is so in tune with the public mind that it never considers the exercise of any coercive power that it does not perceive to be consistent with the voice of the people, they still have no right to suppress the expression of an opinion.
“The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in or opposition to it. 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.”
Quantitative considerations do not apply, Mill explains, because a suppressed opinion is not merely a matter of a certain property having been taken from the one whose speech was suppressed.
[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they 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.
A Quality of Mind
We consider now the case in which an opinion is suppressed because it is taken by many to be false, but it is in fact true.1 More specifically, the situation in view here is that a received opinion is false, and an attempt to speak in opposition to it is suppressed. Mill’s first observation on this is obvious and yet insightful. Those who would suppress an opinion on the grounds that they know it to be false must assume for themselves infallibility. Indeed, this is exactly what’s being attempted when the label disinformation is applied as if it is some objective quality that there is no disagreement about.
A well-resourced, technologically sophisticated, highly placed effort to root out and destroy disinformation has been underway for some years. Nowhere will you find the advocates of this campaign discussing explicitly what disinformation is and how it can be identified in an objective, politically neutral way. And of course, it can’t be. It’s a value judgment, not an objective quality. Yet the invariable pattern is to pass glibly over the word as if we’re talking about something whose identity is trivial to establish. Never will you see the censorship fetishists addressing the question of who gets to define disinformation, for that would give away the game. They seek to hide their agency, but Mill would also have us see that they’re asserting for themselves something that no person may rightly lay claim to: infallibility.
Mill describes two types of people who assume for themselves an implicit infallibility. There are those who know full well that no one, including himself, can claim to be infallible, but they do not consider the possibility that they may be fallible with respect to the opinions that they’re very certain about. There are others, more happily situated than those who are accustomed to never having their opinions controverted, who do not trust their own opinions inordinately, but they operate under the implicit assumption that the public consensus is in some significant sense infallible.
[F]or in proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of "the world" in general.
Our aspiring censors fall into the first category, and those they deceive and confuse fall into the second.
After noting that there is no lack of evidence confirming the fallibility of our own society, and other societies around the world and throughout history, Mill anticipates an objection to his argument. Sure, we may be wrong in our opinion, but we have to act in the world. If we think an opinion is false and harmful, we cannot just ignore it because we might be wrong about it. We must let our conduct be guided by our honestly-held opinions, “and It is assuming no more when we forbid bad men to pervert society by the propagation of opinions which we regard as false and pernicious.”
Mill’s response:
I answer that it is assuming very much more. There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.2
True opinions cannot be known as such if a society is in the habit of pre-judging truth and falsehood and prohibiting the contest of ideas. Let opposing ideas be rejected if they’re tried and found wanting. But to find them wanting and therefore left untried is the slow and sure path to decline and disaster.
Human history gives witness to this principle, Mill argues. From ancient history books to yesterday’s newspaper, there is no lack of evidence for the capacity and propensity of mankind to be wrong. People in every time and place have been wrong about very important things. Repeatedly. Why then is the world not far worse than it is? How is it, Mill asks, that things have gone as well for us as they have, when we see that so many people have had ideas that were proven wrong eventually?
It is owing to a quality of the human mind, the source of everything respectable in man either as an intellectual or as a moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it.
It is the indispensable way of progress and human flourishing.
No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it. The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us. if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this is the sole way of attaining it.
Yet the censor would deny us this opportunity, robbing us of the fruits of our nature.
A Necessary Condition for Greatness
Mill observes that the England of his day no longer puts heretics to death, and seldom imprisons men for holding disfavored opinions. He takes only a modicum of comfort from this, in part because legal sanctions for holding wrong opinions are not entirely unheard of, and he has no illusions that society could never return to the practice of violently suppressing opinions. But the main reason he does not find comfort in the present state of affairs is that less violent forms of suppression may have a more harmful effect on society when considered more broadly. His observations are apposite for our time and place as well.
The “rags and remnants” of persecution from earlier times induce a certain frame of mind against those who dare to diverge from the societal consensus. The feelings that men cherish against those who do not share their views are what make the country “not a place of mental freedom.” The legal penalties of earlier times have left a legacy of social stigma that does more damage than the legal penalties did. Men want to be thought well of, and they also want to earn their living and enjoy the freedom of social intercourse, so they will modify or suppress their opinions on their own when a society is ordered in accordance with the majority’s expectations.
Our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain, or even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or a deceptive light.
In this way, society finds a certain outward peace and stability, but the price we pay for this is “the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.” We settle into a state of affairs where citizens are reticent to express unorthodox opinions. But worse than that, the prevailing mood cuts the nerve of thought and action, robbing society of the innovative impulse and creative energy that has ever been the source of human flourishing.
A state of things in which a large portion of the most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep the genuine principles and grounds of their convictions within their own breasts, and attempt, in what they address to the public, to fit as much as they can of their own conclusions to premises which they have internally renounced, cannot send forth the open, fearless characters, and logical, consistent intellects who once adorned the thinking world. The sort of men who can be looked for under it, are either mere conformers to commonplace, or time-servers for truth, whose arguments on all great subjects are meant for their hearers, and are not those which have convinced themselves.
Can there be a more fitting description of the sort of men and women that our society is cultivating through our dominant institutions? But do not think that Mill is referring directly to harm done to individual persons. The personal effect is regrettable enough, but the real harm done to us all is the resulting disfigurement of society, through which the harm to individuals is greatly amplified.
Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?
Truth, he argues, is advanced more by the bare fact of intellectual freedom than by the rote possession of true facts by someone who has been disabused of the notion of thinking for himself.
Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is 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.
Let us not think, therefore, of the dangers of censorship in such narrow terms as the aspiring censors would have us languish. True enough, the essential freedom of the individual is the ground of our claim. No one has an inherent right to rule over others. But it is a deformation of this principle to suppose that the purpose and goal of the possession of freedom is for the individual to enjoy it merely for his personal satisfaction.
Freedom bears its fruit on the societal level. Inasmuch as a society is composed of individuals, to say this is to say that freedom is ultimately for the enjoyment of the individual. But we receive this blessing mediated through our mutual possession of it, through which its effects are amplified, rendered perspicuous, and sustained. The cramped, naive vision of the censor would deprive us of this, in exchange for a vague promise of safety from a vaporous danger conjured by the imagination of a fading, reactionary elite.
No Fear in Freedom
The foregoing has demonstrated the vacuous reasoning and disingenuous argument of the censor. The suppression of speech has a deleterious societal effect far beyond the simplistic reasoning of the censor, who thinks of human minds as so many nodes in a cognitive infrastructure of which he is a self-appointed curator. Freedom of thought and expression, for the information tyrant, is neither a sacred endowment that he desecrates by his lust to control it, nor the best hope for human flourishing. It is simply an obstacle to the execution of his program.
I don’t know how to disabuse such a person of their delusion that they have the ability, not to mention the right, to manage the world. It’s a far easier matter, however, to expose the lie by which they seek to induce us to ratify their plan. Even apart from the ulterior motives, the faux objectivity, and the unasked and unanswerable question “Who gets to define disinformation?”, we’ve seen with the help of John Stuart Mill that it’s simply not true that there is anything to fear from uncensored speech.
In this post we considered explicitly the suppression of true opinions. In the next post, we consider the suppression of opinions that are false.
I’ve argued that in America today, true opinions are being suppressed not because they’re taken to be false, but because they’re taken to be harmful to an entrenched elite. This is tantamount to saying that they’re suppressed for being true, as it’s well known that those seeking to preserve position and power fear truth far more than falsehood. But we’re considering here the argument that disinformation is threatening the fabric of society, which is ostensibly a claim that opinions must be suppressed becaused they’re taken to be false.
Mill is referring here to the received opinion, arguing that to suppress an opposing opinioon is to assume the truth of the received opinion without trial.