“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.”
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
I’m sure it’s bad practice to start two consecutive essays with the same quote but I’ll let it pass this once, because Mill’s sentence is, I think, the best definition of absolute liberty. To be free to hold one’s opinions even if everyone else opposed them.
To be logically consistent, obviously, it can only include those opinions that don’t infringe on another’s. If my opinion, for instance, was that someone else (who had an opinion) shouldn’t have one, then one of our opinions has to be silenced, for both can’t coexist. It’s the same paradox as too much tolerance leads to intolerance because it tolerates intolerance. The limit of tolerance is therefore intolerance, and my opinion, that is, my right to swing my fist, ends where your nose begins.
Quite naturally, the world isn’t perfect, and opinions of a person will and do infringe on those of others. If it’s someone’s opinion to use a plot of public land for a tennis court and another’s for a swimming pool; both can’t win. That’s inevitable when one has an opinion on something that doesn’t belong to them, or on something that supposedly belongs to everyone. But it perhaps needn’t infringe when it comes to opinions on one’s own things – my opinion of what to build on my land doesn’t infringe on anyone unless it affects our air or water or soil or any shared resource.
‘My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins’ implies this, that my freedom ought not to infringe on another’s comfort, that the same standards one demands for oneself one must grant another. All mankind can no more silence that one person of contrary opinion, than he can them.
It takes two to tango, however; one oughtn’t either to thrust their nose onto another’s fist in order to cry oppression. Nor cry foul when another swings their fist a mile from my nose, claiming injury. For it is an easy and effective and ostensibly noble tactic to take what is an individual problem and convert it into an apparently public one. If you don’t like a book or a movie, that needn’t be your problem, one easily resolved by not reading or watching it, but a collective problem, tackled by ensuring that no one can read or watch it.
One might argue, though, that this actually getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. An individual problem requires a collective solution because the collective issue is also an intimately personal one. I’d never thought of it that way until I read someone expounding on it. A public matter like attitudes towards queers or exposure to ‘indecent’ things or ‘sacrilegious’ books or movies, they asserted, is actually a personal one, because their children (I suppose any group apparently easy to influence comes here) will grow up and live in a world where they’re easily susceptible to such things. Thus, the argument goes, because you care about your kids, you join collective solutions opposed to what ‘threatens’ them.
Does it make sense? I have my doubts. Can you ever sanitize the entire world of ideas or concepts you don’t agree with? And even if you could, wouldn’t their power, when you do eventually stumble upon them, be so much more magnified because of this novelty, like a germ finding a body without resistance? Buddha, after all, mayn’t have been so moved by old age, disease and death if his father hadn’t carefully shielded him from them. When he finally was exposed, the impact was tremendous. Surely, if one did want to keep another from being taken by so-called insidious ideas, the solution is to counter the ideas – and you can only counter something after you acknowledge it. Otherwise, forbidden fruit is usually sweeter, and you only strengthen something when you imbue it with an aura of mystique, all the more so as people wonder what motive you could have had for concealing it.
In any case, is there really any need for ‘protecting’ others in such a manner? Children one can still make allowances for – which is why you have age ratings for movies. But even a minimum of respect for someone, would imply, I think, respecting their liberty to make their own choices; not to, as Mill put it, silence their opinions, even if they differ from yours. And if that were not possible, if one couldn’t tolerate that someone else could possibly think differently as one did, perhaps even then, one might concede them this minimum intelligence to be able to come to the same ‘correct’ conclusion as oneself. Failing that, however, and lacking the tolerance to be able to live with other people making choices one doesn’t approve of, one must try to bring everyone else in line with one’s own notions.
And then you have the self-appointed custodians of the faith, those beautiful souls taking it upon themselves to defend an intangible, indefinable set of ideas. They bravely carry forth, untroubled by the notion that they mayn’t have an idea of what exactly it is they proclaim to be the defenders of. Nor are they struck by the thought that whatever it is, it has survived several millennia without their help and will likely survive several more long after they are ashes and dust. Surely then, whatever it is, this little pinprick that has roused their ire, this book or movie, it is unlikely to bring so great a behemoth down.
Of course, the real reasons for taking such positions – games of power, wealth, status – seldom have much to do with the stated ones. Intricate arguments and debates of this sort, therefore, though perhaps somewhat stimulating, don’t really change anyone’s positions. Nevertheless, it matters, I think, because liberty is a first principle, something that matters in itself, not depending upon or deriving its value from something else. It doesn’t depend on one’s race or wealth or nationality or anything else.
And it is a principle second only to existence itself – the only genuine reason to sacrifice liberty (and even that only to the extent necessary for the duration necessary), I think, could be if existence depends upon it. A war of defence compels the draft, not without reason. Those with empty stomachs and empty bowls , probably don’t care about liberty, at least not until those are filled, though even here there are exceptions.
There are exceptions, of course, because even the hierarchy between liberty and existence, perhaps, is tenuous or at least subjective. Not everyone, I suspect, would consider an existence without liberty worth living.