From our recent experience it is clear that the traditional liberties
of speech and opinion rest on no solid foundation. At a time when
the world needs above all other things the activity of generous
imaginations 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 a 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 minds, creating tension 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 to their critics and not in reference to the facts. For
when thought becomes socially hazardous, men spend more time wondering
about the hazard than they do in cultivating their thought. Yet nothing
is more certain than that mere bold resistance will not permanently
liberate men’s minds. The problem is not only greater than that, but
different, and the time is ripe for reconsideration. 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 exists, 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 of liberty; I can
recall no doctrine of liberty, which, under the acid test, does not
become contingent upon some other ideal. The 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, or can know enough, to do it.
But we all use absolutes, because an ideal which seems to exist apart
from time, space, and circumstance 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 idealizations 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 into
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 when Lenin does? And, _vice
versa_, why is it that the anti-Bolshevist forces in the world are
in favor of restricting constitutional liberty as a preliminary to
establishing genuine liberty in Russia? Clearly the argument about
liberty has little actual relation to the existence of it. It is the
purpose of the social conflict, not the freedom of opinion, that lies
close to the heart of the partisans. The word liberty is a weapon and
an advertisement, but certainly not an ideal which transcends all
special aims.
If there were any man who believed in liberty apart from particular
purposes, that man would be a hermit contemplating all existence with
a hopeful and neutral eye. For him, in the last analysis, there could
be nothing worth resisting, nothing particularly worth attaining,
nothing particularly worth defending, not even the right of hermits
to contemplate existence with a cold and neutral eye. He would be
loyal simply to the possibilities of the human spirit, even to those
possibilities which most seriously impair its variety and its health.
No such man has yet counted much 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
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 that “of course” the freedom granted
shall not be employed too destructively. It is this clause which
checks exuberance and reminds 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 Milton’s
_Areopagitica_ and the essay _On Liberty_ by John Stuart Mill. Of
living men Mr. Bertrand Russell is perhaps the most outstanding
advocate of liberty. The three together are a formidable set of
witnesses. Yet nothing is easier than to draw texts from each which can
be cited either as an argument for absolute liberty or as an excuse for
as much repression as seems desirable at the moment. Says Milton:
Yet if all cannot be of one mind, as who looks they should be? this
doubtles is more wholsome, 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 civill 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 faith or maners
no law 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 not interrupt the unity of
spirit, if we could but find among us the bond of peace.
With this as a text one could set up an inquisition. Yet it occurs
in the noblest plea for liberty that exists in the English language.
The critical point in Milton’s thought is revealed by the word
“indifferences.” The area of opinion which he wished to free comprised
the “neighboring differences” of certain Protestant sects, and only
these where they were truly ineffective in manners and morals. Milton,
in short, had come to the conclusion that certain conflicts of doctrine
were sufficiently insignificant to be tolerated. The conclusion
depended far less upon his notion of the value of liberty than upon
his conception of God and human nature and the England of his time. He
urged indifference to things that were becoming indifferent.
If we substitute the word indifference for the word liberty, we shall
come much closer to the real intention that lies behind the classic
argument. Liberty is to be permitted where differences are of no great
moment. It is this definition which has generally guided practice. In
times when men feel themselves secure, heresy is cultivated as the
spice of life. During a war liberty disappears as the community feels
itself menaced. When revolution seems to be contagious, heresy-hunting
is a respectable occupation. In other words, when men are not afraid,
they are not afraid of ideas; when they are much afraid, they are
afraid of anything that seems, or can even be made to appear,
seditious. That is why nine-tenths of the effort to live and let live
consists in proving that the thing we wish to have tolerated is really
a matter of indifference.
In Mill this truth reveals itself still more clearly. Though his
argument is surer and completer than Milton’s, the qualification is
also surer and completer.
Such being the reasons which make it imperative that human
beings should be free to form opinions, and to express their
opinions without reserve; and such the baneful consequences to
the intellectual and through that to the moral nature of man,
unless this liberty is either conceded or asserted in spite of
prohibition, let us next examine whether the same reasons do not
require that men should be free to act upon their opinions, to
carry these out in their lives, without hindrance, either moral
or physical, from their fellow men, so long as it is at their own
risk and peril. _This last proviso is of course indispensable._
No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions.
On the contrary, _even opinions lose their immunity_ when the
circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute
their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act.
“At their own risk and peril.” In other words, at the risk of eternal
damnation. The premise from which Mill argued was that many opinions
then under the ban of society were of no interest to society, and ought
therefore not to be interfered with. The orthodoxy with which he was at
war was chiefly theocratic. It assumed that a man’s opinions on cosmic
affairs might endanger his personal salvation and make him a dangerous
member of society. Mill did not believe in the theological view, did
not fear damnation, and was convinced that morality did not depend upon
the religious sanction. In fact, he was convinced that a more reasoned
morality could be formed by laying aside theological assumptions. “But
no one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions.” The plain
truth is that Mill did not believe that much action would result from
the toleration of those opinions in which he was most interested.
Political heresy occupied the fringe of his attention, and he uttered
only the most casual comments. So incidental are they, so little do
they impinge on his mind, that the arguments of this staunch apostle of
liberty can be used honestly, and in fact are used, to justify the bulk
of the suppressions which have recently occurred. “Even opinions lose
their immunity, _when the circumstances_ in which they are expressed
are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to
some mischievious act.” Clearly there is no escape here for Debs or
Haywood or obstructors of Liberty Loans. The argument used is exactly
the one employed in sustaining the conviction of Debs.
In corroboration Mill’s single concrete instance may be cited: “An
opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private
property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated
through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered
orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer,
or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.”
Clearly Mill’s theory of liberty wore a different complexion when he
considered opinions which might directly affect social order. Where the
stimulus of opinion upon action was effective he could say with entire
complacency, “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited;
he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.” Because Mill
believed this, it is entirely just to infer that the distinction drawn
between a speech or placard and publication in the press would soon
have broken down for Mill had he lived at a time when the press really
circulated and the art of type-display had made a newspaper strangely
like a placard.
On first acquaintance no man would seem to go further than Mr. Bertrand
Russell in loyalty to what he calls “the unfettered development of all
the instincts that build up life and fill it with mental delights.”
He calls these instincts “creative”; and against them he sets off the
“possessive impulses.” These, he says, should be restricted by “a
public authority, a repository of practically irresistible force whose
function should be primarily to repress the private use of force.”
Where Milton said no “tolerated Popery,” Mr. Russell says, no tolerated
“possessive impulses.” Surely he is open to the criticism that, like
every authoritarian who has preceded him, he is interested in the
unfettered development of only that which seems good to him. Those who
think that “enlightened selfishness” produces social harmony will
tolerate more of the possessive impulses, and will be inclined to put
certain of Mr. Russell’s creative impulses under lock and key.
The moral is, not that Milton, Mill, and Bertrand Russell are
inconsistent, or that liberty is to be obtained by arguing for it
without qualifications. The impulse to what we call liberty is as
strong in these three men as it is ever likely to be in our society.
The moral is of another kind. It is that the traditional core of
liberty, namely, the notion of indifference, is too feeble and unreal
a doctrine to protect the purpose of liberty, which is the furnishing
of a healthy environment in which human judgment and inquiry can most
successfully organize human life. Too feeble, because in time of stress
nothing is easier than to insist, and by insistence to convince, that
tolerated indifference is no longer tolerable because it has ceased to
be indifferent.
It is clear that in a society where public opinion has become
decisive, nothing that counts in the formation of it can really be a
matter of indifference. When I say “can be,” I am speaking literally.
What men believed about the constitution of heaven became a matter
of indifference when heaven disappeared in metaphysics; but what
they believe about property, government, conscription, taxation,
the origins of the late war, or the origins of the Franco-Prussian
War, or the distribution of Latin culture in the vicinity of copper
mines, constitutes the difference between life and death, prosperity
and misfortune, and it will never on this earth be tolerated as
indifferent, or not interfered with, no matter how many noble arguments
are made for liberty, or how many martyrs give their lives for it.
If widespread tolerance of opposing views is to be achieved in modern
society, it will not be simply by fighting the Debs’ cases through the
courts, and certainly not by threatening to upset those courts if they
do not yield to the agitation. The task is fundamentally of another
order, requiring other methods and other theories.
The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become
so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding. What he knows of
events that matter enormously to him, the purposes of governments, the
aspirations of peoples, the struggle of classes, he knows at second,
third, or fourth hand. He cannot go and see for himself. Even the
things that are near to him have become too involved for his judgment.
I know of no man, even among those who devote all of their time to
watching public affairs, who can even pretend to keep track, at the
same time, of his city government, his state government, Congress, the
departments, the industrial situation, and the rest of the world. What
men who make the study of politics a vocation cannot do, the man who
has an hour a day for newspapers and talk cannot possibly hope to do.
He must seize catchwords and headlines or nothing.
This vast elaboration of the subject-matter of politics is the root of
the whole problem. News comes from a distance; it comes helter-skelter,
in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily
understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who
must take what is given to them. Any lawyer with a sense of evidence
knows how unreliable such information must necessarily be.
The taking of testimony in a trial is hedged about with a thousand
precautions derived from long experience of the fallibility of the
witness and the prejudices of the jury. We call this, and rightly, a
fundamental phase of human liberty. But in public affairs the stake
is infinitely greater. It involves the lives of millions, and the
fortune of everybody. The jury is the whole community, not even the
qualified voters alone. The jury is everybody who creates public
sentiment--chattering gossips, unscrupulous liars, congenital liars,
feeble-minded people, prostitute minds, corrupting agents. To this jury
any testimony is submitted, is submitted in any form, by any anonymous
person, with no test of reliability, no test of credibility, and no
penalty for perjury. If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my
neighbor’s cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers
in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if
I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible. Nobody
will punish me if I lie about Japan, for example. I can announce that
every Japanese valet is a reservist, and every Japanese art store a
mobilization center. I am immune. And if there should be hostilities
with Japan, the more I lied the more popular I should be. If I asserted
that the Japanese secretly drank the blood of children, that Japanese
women were unchaste, that the Japanese were really not a branch of the
human race after all, I guarantee that most of the newspapers would
print it eagerly, and that I could get a hearing in churches all over
the country. And all this for the simple reason that the public, when
it is dependent on testimony and protected by no rules of evidence, can
act only on the excitement of its pugnacities and its hopes.
The mechanism of the news-supply has developed without plan, and there
is no one point in it at which one can fix the responsibility for
truth. The fact is that the subdivision of labor is now accompanied
by the subdivision of the news-organization. At one end of it is the
eye-witness, at the other, the reader. Between the two is a vast,
expensive transmitting and editing apparatus. This machine works
marvelously well at times, particularly in the rapidity with which
it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the
death of a monarch, or the result of an election. But where the
issue is complex, as for example in the matter of the success of a
policy, or the social conditions among a foreign people,--that is to
say, where the real answer is neither yes or no, but subtle, and a
matter of balanced evidence,--the subdivision of the labor involved in
the report causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even
misrepresentation.
Thus the number of eye-witnesses capable of honest statement is
inadequate and accidental. Yet the reporter making up his news is
dependent upon the eye-witnesses. They may be actors in the event. Then
they can hardly be expected to have perspective. Who, for example,
if he put aside his own likes and dislikes would trust a Bolshevik’s
account of what exists in Soviet Russia or an exiled Russian prince’s
story of what exists in Siberia? Sitting just across the frontier,
say in Stockholm, how is a reporter to write dependable news when his
witnesses consist of _emigrés_ or Bolshevist agents?
At the Peace Conference, news was given out by the agents of the
conferees and the rest leaked through those who were clamoring at the
doors of the Conference. Now the reporter, if he is to earn his living,
must nurse his personal contacts with the eye-witnesses and privileged
informants. If he is openly hostile to those in authority, he will
cease to be a reporter unless there is an opposition party in the inner
circle who can feed him news. Failing that, he will know precious
little of what is going on.
Most people seem to believe that, when they meet a war correspondent or
a special writer from the Peace Conference, they have seen a man who
has seen the things he wrote about. Far from it. Nobody, for example,
saw this war. Neither the men in the trenches nor the commanding
general. The men saw their trenches, their billets, sometimes they saw
an enemy trench, but nobody, unless it be the aviators, saw a battle.
What the correspondents saw, occasionally, was the terrain over which
a battle had been fought; but what they reported day by day was what
they were told at press headquarters, and of that only what they were
allowed to tell.
At the Peace Conference the reporters were allowed to meet periodically
the four least important members of the Commission, men who themselves
had considerable difficulty in keeping track of things, as any reporter
who was present will testify. This was supplemented by spasmodic
personal interviews with the commissioners, their secretaries, their
secretaries’ secretaries, other newspaper men, and confidential
representatives of the President, who stood between him and the
impertinences of curiosity. This and the French press, than which there
is nothing more censored and inspired, a local English trade-journal
of the expatriates, the gossip of the Crillon lobby, the Majestic, and
the other official hotels, constituted the source of the news upon
which American editors and the American people have had to base one of
the most difficult judgments of their history. I should perhaps add
that there were a few correspondents occupying privileged positions
with foreign governments. They wore ribbons in their button-holes to
prove it. They were in many ways the most useful correspondents because
they always revealed to the trained reader just what it was that their
governments wished America to believe.
The news accumulated by the reporter from his witnesses has to be
selected, if for no other reason than that the cable facilities are
limited. At the cable office several varieties of censorship intervene.
The legal censorship in Europe is political as well as military, and
both words are elastic. It has been applied, not only to the substance
of the news, but to the mode of presentation, and even to the character
of the type and the position on the page. But the real censorship on
the wires is the cost of transmission. This in itself is enough to
limit any expensive competition or any significant independence. The
big Continental news agencies are subsidized. Censorship operates also
through congestion and the resultant need of a system of priority.
Congestion makes possible good and bad service, and undesirable
messages are not infrequently served badly.
When the report does reach the editor, another series of interventions
occurs. The editor is a man who may know all about something, but he
can hardly be expected to know all about everything. Yet he has to
decide the question which is of more importance than any other in the
formation of opinions, the question where attention is to be directed.
In a newspaper the heads are the foci of attention, the odd corners the
fringe; and whether one aspect of the news or another appears in the
center or at the periphery makes all the difference in the world. The
news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible
medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears,
and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly
sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in
all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people
determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read.
It is the only book they read every day. Now the power to determine
each day what shall seem important and what shall be neglected is a
power unlike any that has been exercised since the Pope lost his hold
on the secular mind.
The ordering is not done by one man, but by a host of men, who are on
the whole curiously unanimous in their selection and in their emphasis.
Once you know the party and social affiliations of a newspaper, you
can predict with considerable certainty the perspective in which the
news will be displayed. This perspective is by no means altogether
deliberate. Though the editor is ever so much more sophisticated than
all but a minority of his readers, his own sense of relative importance
is determined by rather standardized constellations of ideas. He very
soon comes to believe that his habitual emphasis is the only possible
one.
Why the editor is possessed by a particular set of ideas is a
difficult question in social psychology, of which no adequate analysis
has been made. But we shall not be far wrong if we say that he deals
with the news in reference to the prevailing _mores_ of his social
group. These _mores_ are of course in a large measure the product of
what previous newspapers have said; and experience shows that, in order
to break out of this circle, it has been necessary at various times
to create new forms of journalism, such as the national monthly, the
critical weekly, the circular, the paid advertisements of ideas, in
order to change the emphasis which had become obsolete and habit-ridden.
Into this extremely refractory, and I think increasingly disserviceable
mechanism, there has been thrown, especially since the outbreak of
war, another monkey-wrench--propaganda. The word, of course, covers
a multitude of sins and a few virtues. The virtues can be easily
separated out, and given another name, either advertisement or
advocacy. Thus, if the National Council of Belgravia wishes to publish
a magazine out of its own funds, under its own imprint, advocating
the annexation of Thrums, no one will object. But if, in support of
that advocacy, it gives to the press stories that are lies about the
atrocities committed in Thrums; or, worse still, if those stories
seem to come from Geneva, or Amsterdam, not from the press-service
of the National Council of Belgravia, then Belgravia is conducting
propaganda. If, after arousing a certain amount of interest in itself,
Belgravia then invites a carefully selected correspondent, or perhaps
a labor leader, to its capital, puts him up at the best hotel, rides
him around in limousines, fawns on him at banquets, lunches with him
very confidentially, and then puts him through a conducted tour so that
he shall see just what will create the desired impression, then again
Belgravia is conducting propaganda. Or if Belgravia happens to possess
the greatest trombone-player in the world, and if she sends him over
to charm the wives of influential husbands, Belgravia is, in a less
objectionable way, perhaps, committing propaganda, and making fools of
the husbands.
Now, the plain fact is that out of the troubled areas of the world
the public receives practically nothing that is not propaganda. Lenin
and his enemies control all the news there is of Russia, and no
court of law would accept any of the testimony as valid in a suit to
determine the possession of a donkey. I am writing many months after
the Armistice. The Senate is at this moment engaged in debating the
question whether it will guarantee the frontiers of Poland; but what
we learn of Poland we learn from the Polish Government and the Jewish
Committee. Judgment on the vexed issues of Europe is simply out of the
question for the average American; and the more cocksure he is, the
more certainly is he the victim of some propaganda.
These instances are drawn from foreign affairs, but the difficulty at
home, although less flagrant, is nevertheless real. Theodore Roosevelt,
and Leonard Wood after him, have told us to think nationally. It is not
easy. It is easy to parrot what those people say who live in a few big
cities and who have constituted themselves the only true and authentic
voice of America. But beyond that it is difficult. I live in New York
and I have not the vaguest idea what Brooklyn is interested in. It is
possible, with effort, much more effort than most people can afford to
give, for me to know what a few organized bodies like the Non-Partisan
League, the National Security League, the American Federation of
Labor, and the Republican National Committee are up to; but what the
unorganized workers, and the unorganized farmers, the shopkeepers, the
local bankers and boards of trade are thinking and feeling, no one has
any means of knowing, except perhaps in a vague way at election time.
To think nationally means, at least, to take into account the major
interests and needs and desires of this continental population; and for
that each man would need a staff of secretaries, traveling agents, and
a very expensive press-clipping bureau.
We do not think nationally because the facts that count are not
systematically reported and presented in a form we can digest. Our
most abysmal ignorance occurs where we deal with the immigrant. If
we read his press at all, it is to discover “Bolshevism” in it and
to blacken all immigrants with suspicion. For his culture and his
aspirations, for his high gifts of hope and variety, we have neither
eyes nor ears. The immigrant colonies are like holes in the road which
we never notice until we trip over them. Then, because we have no
current information and no background of facts, we are, of course, the
undiscriminating objects of any agitator who chooses to rant against
“foreigners.”
Now, men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their
environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The
quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only
where the audience is deprived of independent access to information.
But where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony
is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to
opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities
themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.
The whole reference of thought comes to be what somebody asserts, not
what actually is. Men ask, not whether such and such a thing occurred
in Russia, but whether Mr. Raymond Robins is at heart more friendly
to the Bolsheviki than Mr. Jerome Landfield. And so, since they are
deprived of any trustworthy means of knowing what is really going on,
since everything is on the plane of assertion and propaganda, they
believe whatever fits most comfortably with their prepossessions.
That this breakdown of the means of public knowledge should occur at
a time of immense change is a compounding of the difficulty. From
bewilderment to panic is a short step, as everyone knows who has
watched a crowd when danger threatens. At the present time a nation
easily acts like a crowd. Under the influence of headlines and panicky
print, the contagion of unreason can easily spread through a settled
community. For when the comparatively recent and unstable nervous
organization which makes us capable of responding to reality as it is,
and not as we should wish it, is baffled over a continuing period of
time, the more primitive but much stronger instincts are let loose.
War and Revolution, both of them founded on censorship and propaganda,
are the supreme destroyers of realistic thinking, because the excess of
danger and the fearful overstimulation of passion unsettle disciplined
behavior. Both breed fanatics of all kinds, men who, in the words of
Mr. Santayana, have redoubled their effort when they have forgotten
their aim. The effort itself has become the aim. Men live in their
effort, and for a time find great exaltation. They seek stimulation
of their effort rather than direction of it. That is why both in war
and revolution there seems to operate a kind of Gresham’s Law of the
emotions, in which leadership passes by a swift degradation from a
Mirabeau to a Robespierre; and in war, from a high-minded statesmanship
to the depths of virulent, hating jingoism.
The cardinal fact always is the loss of contact with objective
information. Public as well as private reason depends upon it. Not
what somebody says, not what somebody wishes were true, but what is
so beyond all our opining, constitutes the touchstone of our sanity.
And a society which lives at second-hand will commit incredible
follies and countenance inconceivable brutalities if that contact
is intermittent and untrustworthy. Demagoguery is a parasite that
flourishes where discrimination fails, and only those who are at grips
with things themselves are impervious to it. For, in the last analysis,
the demagogue, whether of the Right or the Left, is, consciously or
unconsciously an undetected liar.
Many students of politics have concluded that, because public opinion
was unstable, the remedy lay in making government as independent
of it as possible. The theorists of representative government have
argued persistently from this premise against the believers in direct
legislation. But it appears now that, while they have been making their
case against direct legislation, rather successfully it seems to
me, they have failed sufficiently to notice the increasing malady of
representative government.
Parliamentary action is becoming notoriously ineffective. In America
certainly the concentration of power in the Executive is out of
all proportion either to the intentions of the Fathers or to the
orthodox theory of representative government. The cause is fairly
clear. Congress is an assemblage of men selected for local reasons
from districts. It brings to Washington a more or less accurate sense
of the superficial desires of its constituency. In Washington it is
supposed to think nationally and internationally. But for that task
its equipment and its sources of information are hardly better than
that of any other reader of the newspaper. Except for its spasmodic
investigating committees, Congress has no particular way of informing
itself. But the Executive has. The Executive is an elaborate hierarchy
reaching to every part of the nation and to all parts of the world.
It has an independent machinery, fallible and not too truthworthy,
of course, but nevertheless a machinery of intelligence. It can be
informed and it can act, whereas Congress is not informed and cannot
act.
Now the popular theory of representative government is that the
representatives have the information and therefore create the policy
which the executive administers. The more subtle theory is that the
executive initiates the policy which the legislature corrects in
accordance with popular wisdom. But when the legislature is haphazardly
informed, this amounts to very little, and the people themselves prefer
to trust the executive which knows, rather than the Congress which is
vainly trying to know. The result has been the development of a kind
of government which has been harshly described as plebiscite autocracy,
or government by newspapers. Decisions in the modern state tend to be
made by the interaction, not of Congress and the executive, but of
public opinion and the executive.
Public opinion for this purpose finds itself collected about special
groups which act as extra-legal organs of government. There is a
labor nucleus, a farmers’ nucleus, a prohibition nucleus, a National
Security League nucleus, and so on. These groups conduct a continual
electioneering campaign upon the unformed, exploitable mass of
public opinion. Being special groups, they have special sources of
information, and what they lack in the way of information is often
manufactured. These conflicting pressures beat upon the executive
departments and upon Congress, and formulate the conduct of the
government. The government itself acts in reference to these groups
far more than in reference to the district congressmen. So politics as
it is now played consists in coercing and seducing the representative
by the threat and the appeal of these unofficial groups. Sometimes
they are the allies, sometimes the enemies, of the party in power, but
more and more they are the energy of public affairs. Government tends
to operate by the impact of controlled opinion upon administration.
This shift in the locus of sovereignty has placed a premium upon the
manufacture of what is usually called consent. No wonder that the most
powerful newspaper proprietor in the English-speaking world declined a
mere government post.
No wonder, too, that the protection of the sources of its opinion
is the basic problem of democracy. Everything else depends upon it.
Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evidence,
without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular
decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation.
That is why I have argued that the older doctrine of liberty was
misleading. It did not assume a public opinion that governs.
Essentially it demanded toleration of opinions that were, as Milton
said, indifferent. It can guide us little in a world where opinion is
sensitive and decisive.
The axis of the controversy needs to be shifted. The attempt to draw
fine distinctions between “liberty” and “license” is no doubt part of
the day’s work, but it is fundamentally a negative part. It consists
in trying to make opinion responsible to prevailing social standards,
whereas the really important thing is to try and make opinion
increasingly responsible to the facts. There can be no liberty for a
community which lacks the information by which to detect lies. Trite as
the conclusion may at first seem, it has, I believe, immense practical
consequences, and may perhaps offer an escape from the logomachy into
which the contests of liberty so easily degenerate.
It may be bad to suppress a particular opinion, but the really deadly
thing is to suppress the news. In time of great insecurity, certain
opinions acting on unstable minds may cause infinite disaster. Knowing
that such opinions necessarily originate in slender evidence, that
they are propelled more by prejudice from the rear than by reference
to realities, it seems to me that to build the case for liberty upon
the dogma of their unlimited prerogatives is to build it upon the
poorest foundation. For, even though we grant that the world is best
served by the liberty of all opinion, the plain fact is that men are
too busy and too much concerned to fight more than spasmodically for
such liberty. When freedom of opinion is revealed as freedom of error,
illusion, and misinterpretation, it is virtually impossible to stir up
much interest in its behalf. It is the thinnest of all abstractions and
an over-refinement of mere intellectualism. But people, wide circles
of people, are aroused when their curiosity is baulked. The desire
to know, the dislike of being deceived and made game of, is a really
powerful motive, and it is that motive that can best be enlisted in the
cause of freedom.
What, for example, was the one most general criticism of the work
of the Peace Conference? It was that the covenants were not openly
arrived at. This fact stirred Republican Senators, British Labor, the
whole gamut of parties from the Right to the Left. And in the last
analysis lack of information about the Conference _was_ the origin
of its difficulties. Because of the secrecy endless suspicion was
aroused; because of it the world seemed to be presented with a series
of accomplished facts which it could not reject and did not wish
altogether to accept. It was lack of information which kept public
opinion from affecting the negotiations at the time when intervention
would have counted most and cost least. Publicity occurred when the
covenants were arrived at, with all the emphasis on the _at_. This
is what the Senate objected to, and this is what alienated much more
liberal opinion than the Senate represents.
In a passage quoted previously in this essay, Milton said that
differences of opinion, “which though they may be many, yet need
not interrupt the unity of spirit, if we could but find among us the
bond of peace.” There is but one kind of unity possible in a world as
diverse as ours. It is unity of method, rather than of aim; the unity
of the disciplined experiment. There is but one bond of peace that is
both permanent and enriching: the increasing knowledge of the world in
which experiment occurs. With a common intellectual method and a common
area of valid fact, differences may become a form of coöperation and
cease to be an irreconcilable antagonism.
That, I think, constitutes the meaning of freedom for us. We cannot
successfully define liberty, or accomplish it, by a series of
permissions and prohibitions. For that is to ignore the content of
opinion in favor of its form. Above all, it is an attempt to define
liberty of opinion in terms of opinion. It is a circular and sterile
logic. A useful definition of liberty is obtainable only by seeking
the principle of liberty in the main business of human life, that is
to say, in the process by which men educate their response and learn
to control their environment. In this view liberty is the name we
give to measures by which we protect and increase the veracity of the
information upon which we act.