Is anything gained for anyone by insisting that truth resides on one side only of a particular Pyrenees?
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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But “true” opinions, on examination, usually turn out to be the opinions which suit the proponents of some particular cause.
And if we are to continue this campaign of prohibition to its appointed and logical end, shall we have time for any other social adventure?
When you remember the descriptions applied by Mr William Sunday to those who do not accept Christianity, you cannot, I think, avoid a sense that there is a religious blasphemy for which, at least from the angle of good manners, nothing…
But if we are to suppress works, and punish their authors, because they cause grief to certain of our fellow-citizens, exactly how far are we to carry the principle?
We denominate as blasphemous works calculated to bring the principles of Christianity into hatred, ridicule, or contempt.
Every religious body really means by blasphemy an attack upon its fundamental principles.
I cannot, moreover, forget that what is blasphemy in Tennessee is common sense in New York, that the works of Wollaston and Toland and Chubb, which seemed entirely blasphemous to their generation, seem commonplace to ourselves.
The thing they call “innocence” I believe to be quite wanton ignorance, and, by its abridgment of freedom, it imprisons human personality in a fashion that is quite unpardonable.
Virtuous people who shrink from frank discussion in this realm seem to me responsible for probably more gratuitous suffering than any other group of human beings.
Questions like those of birth control, extra-marital love, companionate marriage, sexual perversion, cannot really be faced in a scientific fashion by applying to them the standards of a nomadic Eastern people which drew up its rules more…
I do not know, indeed, how we are to create a healthy social attitude to the problems of sex, if all that deals with it from a new point of view, and with a frankness that admits the experimental nature of our contemporary solutions, is to…
On their tests of obscenity the Bible certainly could not hope to escape; yet they believe, in general, that the Bible is the inspired word of God, a position which, I venture to suggest, should at the least give them pause.
It is worth while pointing out that those most concerned with the suppression of “obscene” books are religious people.
The Bible, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Plato, Horace, Catullus, to take names at random, would all come under the ban.
Let me remind you, moreover, of what cannot too often be pointed out, that the rigorous application of the legal tests of obscenity would prohibit the circulation of a very considerable part of the great literature of the world.
My point is that in a choice, say, between the average police magistrate and Mr Robert Morss Lovett, I am not prepared to accept the former’s opinion of what I may be safely left to read.
Yet I observe that some of the most eminent American critics have praised it as the finest example of a novel seeking the truth about the sexual relations of men and women that an Englishman has published in the twentieth century.
I, certainly, am not prepared, on a priori grounds, to say that a lawyer, however well-trained in the law, has a better sense of what is likely to produce moral depravity than Mr Bennett or Mr Shaw; and a reading of Miss Hall’s dull and…
The official censor, a man like the famous Pobedonostev, normally assumes that any thorough criticism of the existing social order is dangerous and destructive; and, thereby, he transforms what might be creative demand into secret attack…
The self-appointed person, Mr Comstock, for instance, merely identifies his private view of moral right with the ultimate principles of ethics; and only the intellectually blind would ask that the citizen be fitted to his vicious bed of…
A mere zeal for the well-being of society is an utterly inadequate qualification; for most persons who have played the part of censor have possessed this and have yet been utterly unfit for their task.
If, again, the view held is wholly true, nothing whatever is gained by preventing its expression.
If the view is true in part only, the separation of truth and falsehood is accomplished most successfully in a free intellectual competition, a process of dissociation by rational criticism, in which those who hold the false opinion are…
If the view held is untrue, experience shows that conviction of its untruth is invariably a matter of time; it does not come because authority announces that it is untrue.
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