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"Mill and Censoriousness." Censorship Moments: Reading Texts in the History of Censorship and Freedom of Expression

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Claeys, Gregory. "Mill and Censoriousness." Censorship Moments: Reading Texts in the History of Censorship and Freedom of Expression. Ed. Geoff Kemp. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 133–140. Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472593078.ch-018>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 09:22 UTC. Copyright © Geoff Kemp and contributors 2015. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 17 Mill and Censoriousness Gregory Claeys In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves – what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature?1 John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) is today justly famous for offering the most vigorous defence of the individual’s right to be left alone in matters which concern only themselves, and it is chiefly for this argument that Mill is usually regarded as our most important liberal political philosopher. The chief reason for the vehemence of Mill’s defence lies in the idea of the ‘tyranny of the majority’, which he largely inherited from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in 134 Censorship Moments America (2 vols, 1835–1840). In vol. 1, ch. 15 of his famous work, Tocqueville had dilated at length upon the ‘effects of the tyranny of the majority upon the national character of the Americans’, describing this as a new and worrying tendency in democracy and complaining that ‘I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America.’ Such was the overwhelming power of public opinion in the United States, Tocqueville lamented, that ‘freedom of opinion does not exist in America’.2 Mill, who had never visited the US, took this to heart, reviewing Tocqueville’s volumes as they appeared. On Liberty was in part a direct reaction to Tocqueville’s paradox that greater democracy might fatally undermine liberty of thought and that the power of public opinion was sufficiently great generally to be the source of the ‘love of glory; the love of praise; the love of admiration; the love of respect and deference; even the love of sympathy’.3 This chapter will take up two aspects of Mill’s discussion of these issues: the question of freedom of speech in relation to religion; and the issue of ‘moral coercion’ to improve or restrain behaviour in everyday life. I will try to show that while Mill was very averse to ‘censorship’ in the sense of interceding with free speech, he in fact encouraged ‘censoriousness’ in the sense of censuring behaviour deserving of moral disapprobation but not legal restraint. The spectrum and type of interventions suggested by Mill were thus quite different from those often associated with liberalism. In chapter 2 of On Liberty, ‘On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion’, Mill tried to meet these problems head-on, in the recognition that social intolerance might be even more stifling than legal repression in preventing the free play of opinion and thus the emergence of truth. Tying freedom of speech closely to his general theory of progress, he proposed a regime of far greater toleration, official and unofficial, than existed in either Britain or the US at the time. He famously contended that even ‘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’ (33). We could, he insisted, never be sure that an opinion being stifled was in fact false, and the presumption of infallibility which accompanied the stifling was itself wrong. But we might well reflect that even if it were, false opinions served the vital purpose of sharpening the truth of their counterparts. With respect to liberty of the press, he here took up an issue, tyrannicide, which remains highly relevant to us today, albeit under the label of ‘terrorism’. Mill argued that abstract discussions of the principle itself should not be deemed punishable, but ‘the instigation to it, in a specific case, may be a Mill and Censoriousness 135 proper subject of punishment, but only if an overt act has followed, and at least a probable connexion can be established between the act and the instigation’ (32). Mill’s chief concern, however, was with more common instances of the suppression of free speech. Here religion was Mill’s particular example, from the killing of Socrates to the persecution of Jesus (whom Mill admired) to the gaoling of Mill’s friend George Jacob Holyoake, to the refusal of contemporaries to swear an oath on the Bible in court. Bypassing the issue of the truth content of any particular religion, and offering a radically relativist and environmentalist conception of religious truth instead, Mill contended that religious beliefs were a function of upbringing. Thus the same causes which made someone ‘a Churchman in London, would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin’ (35). As an agnostic (a label he usually preferred to atheist, though he admitted he had never believed in a deity), Mill believed that religion played a major role in inhibiting the progress of rational argument, particularly where practical morality was concerned, and led to a host of unreasonable restrictions (sabbatarian legislation, diet) which were unjustifiable on any other grounds than mere prejudice. Indisputably he defended here his own particular cause; he was reluctant to trumpet his agnosticism too loudly, but he did state that ‘a large proportion of infidels in all ages have been persons of distinguished integrity and honour’ (55–56). Heresy had the virtue of challenging the propositions of every religion, and its advantages had to be acknowledged as such. Social heresies, too, such as Rousseau’s critique of civilization, had to be met head on rather than suppressed. Religion was thus the paradigm of unquestioned dogma, whose criticism was an essential element in the progress of rational opinion generally even if the process was hemmed in at times by prudential considerations. Mill’s defence of freedom of opinion was correspondingly almost unbounded, and certainly went well beyond the limit of ‘offence’ which is currently common in public debate, particularly where religious belief was concerned. Within certain boundaries (speech before an agitated crowd, for instance, in which ‘speech’ and ‘act’ were nearly proximate), Mill clearly would have permitted such criticism even in the face of the hypersensitivity of some zealous onlookers. ‘Harm’ thus did not usually translate into ‘hurt’, defined subjectively as ‘offence’, where opinions were concerned. To bow to either majority or minority voices in such matters in order to avoid ‘offence’ would be a retrograde move. If we assume ‘offence’ to entail hurting someone’s feelings, or causing them to feel angry, resentful or irritated, we can safely say that Mill would have regarded these responses as a reasonable price to pay for intellectual freedom. 136 Censorship Moments Current legislation, however, is remarkably loose respecting these issues. In Britain, the Public Order Act (sections 4a and 5, 1986) deems it an offence where threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour causes or is likely to cause another person harassment, alarm or distress (in 2012 the removal of the word ‘insulting’ was proposed). In addition the Racial and Religious Hatred Act (2006) makes it an offence to use threatening words or behaviour intended to stir up religious hatred, with up to seven years imprisonment if convicted. As has often been pointed out, the problem with such legislation is that ‘alarm’, ‘distress’, indeed even ‘religious hatred’ are almost entirely subjective categories. One person may tolerate an open debate which impugns the first principles of their religion; the next may deem it offensive to question in any way any precept they hold. To the one, rational discussion can be countenanced; to the other, every such discussion strikes at the heart of psychological identity and is a deep wound. Close textual scholarship to demonstrate the historical rather than divine formation of religious beliefs may be deemed unacceptable.
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