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.
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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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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
We denominate as blasphemous works calculated to bring the principles of Christianity into hatred, ridicule, or contempt.
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?
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…
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?
But “true” opinions, on examination, usually turn out to be the opinions which suit the proponents of some particular cause.
Is anything gained for anyone by insisting that truth resides on one side only of a particular Pyrenees?
Is it not wisdom to begin by an admission of its many-sidedness?
And does not that admission involve an unlimited freedom of expression in the interpretation of facts?
For facts, as William James said, are not born free and equal.
They have to be interpreted in the light of our experience; and to suppress someone’s experience is to suppress someone’s personality, to impose upon him our view of what his life implies to the forcible exclusion of that in which alone he…
I have denied that prohibitions arising from blasphemy or obscenity, or historical or social unfairness, have any justification.
They are bad because they prevent necessary social ventilation.
They are bad because they exclude the general public from access to facts and ideas which are often of vital importance.
They are bad because no one is wise or virtuous enough to stand in judgment upon what another man is to think or say or write.
They are bad because they are incapable of commonsense application; there is never any possibility of a wise discrimination in their application.
They give excessive protection to old traditions; they make excessively difficult the entrance of new.
They confer power in a realm where qualifications for the exercise of power, and tests for its application, are, almost necessarily, non-existent.
Suppression here means not the prohibition of the untrue or the unjust or the immoral, but of opinions unpleasing to those who exercise the censorship.
But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
