RUTHFULLY YOURS

The most curious thing about the political class’s war in defence of truth is that it coexists with a war against freedom of speech. In one breath, our betters, whether it’s the technocrats of the EU or broadsheet thinkers, bemoan a crisis of truth, claiming that a combination of demagoguery and populist myth-making has propelled the modern West into a ‘post-truth’ era. Yet in the next they express disdain for the ideal of unfettered free thought and debate. Whether they’re instituting laws against ‘hate speech’ or enforcing social stigma against such things as ‘climate-change denial’ or ‘Europhobia’, they exhibit a palpable discomfort with the idea of a fully open public sphere in which nothing is unsayable.

We might even say that in 2017, there are two things that really animate the political and cultural elites of the West: first, their self-styled urge to defend truth, their pose as warriors for honesty against the misinformation of the new populists; and secondly, their agitation with unfettered discussion and with the expression of what they consider to be hateful or outré views. This is striking, because truth without freedom, without the freest possible space in which to debate and doubt and blaspheme, is not truth at all. It is dogma. It represents an assumption of intellectual and moral infallibility rather than a winning and proving of it in the only way that counts: through free public contestation. That our rulers both claim to love truth and fear freedom of speech utterly explodes the pretensions of their moral panic about a ‘post-truth’ era. It’s not truth they want to protect – it’s the authority of their prejudice.

Anybody genuinely concerned with the idea of truth, with deepening humanity’s understanding of itself, nature and society, with encouraging the deployment of reason in order to render the world more knowable, ought to have a natural and in fact quite fierce disposition to freedom of thought and speech. The two go hand in hand. Actually, the one — truth — is reliant on the other — freedom. This point has been consistently argued by liberals throughout the modern period. John Milton, in his passionate plea in 1644 against the licensing of the press in England, famously argued that we should ‘Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter?’ To guard the truth, or what we presume to be true, from free, open discussion is to do truth an ‘injury’, said Milton — it ‘misdoubts her strength’.

Truth without freedom, without the freest possible space in which to debate and doubt and blaspheme, is not truth at all.

Censorship, Milton argued, is the implacable enemy of truth. In fact it is the ‘stop of Truth’. Repressing the utterance or publication of ‘scandalous, seditious, and libellous’ material is often done in the name of preserving truth, he said, but in fact it commits two wrongs against truth. First, in assuming the public should not have to think for itself, and in fact cannot do so, it weakens the public’s intellectual and moral capacities, dulling their ability autonomously to distinguish truth from falsehood. In ‘disexercising and blunting our abilities’, censorship represents a ‘discouragement of all learning’, said Milton. ‘Our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs’, he said. That is, we must use our mental and moral muscles, our faculty of judgement, as surely as we use our physical muscles, and censorship prevents us from doing that. And secondly, the censorship of scandal or sedition or ‘evil’ shrinks the sphere of public discussion and thus puts off the potential discovery of greater truths, he argued — by ‘hindring and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civill Wisdome’.

So censorship is hostile to truth both in its implicit doubting of the public’s capacity for critical, truthful thought and in its weakening of the kind of conditions in which old ideas might come to be superseded by newer, more truthful ones. Milton strikingly argued that if someone thinks something is true simply because he has been told it’s true, then this isn’t ‘truth’ in any meaningful sense. He wrote: ‘If [a man] beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, [then] though his belief be true, the very truth he holds becomes his heresie.’ Why? Because he has ‘gladly [posted] off to another’ the ‘charge and care’ of his beliefs and worldview. That is, he has outsourced his own moral universe to a higher authority; his belief in truth is passive and childish; truth has been given to him, not discovered or learned by him. CONTINUE AT SITE