Men may actually go out to die for purposes in which they profoundly believe, though the cause which, as they judge, embodies those purposes has not, in fact, the remotest connexion with it.
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.
gutenberg.org
We have, in short, the difficulty that the control of news by special interests may make prisoners of men who believe themselves to be free.
The Englishman who has to form an opinion about a miners’ strike is not likely to be “free” in any sense to which meaning can be attached if the facts which he encounters have been specially doctored in order to make it as certain as…
The psychologists are unanimous in telling us how important for our future are the impressions we gather in our early years.
It may make all the difference to the intellectual climate of a people whether, for instance, the history learned by children in schools is wide and generous, or parochial and narrow, whether its teachers cultivate the sceptical mind, or…
People who are imprisoned in dogmas in childhood will have an agonizing struggle to escape from its stereotypes, and they may well have been so taught that they either, after effort, succumb, or do not even know that it is necessary to…
I do not know how to emphasize sufficiently the quite inescapable importance to freedom of the content of the educational process.
Teach a child year in and year out that the American Constitution is the ultimate embodiment of political wisdom and you increase tenfold the difficulty of rational and necessary amendment by the generation to which that child belongs.
And we must add to the school influence in childhood, that of the home, the church, the streets, in the terrible certainty that there are few impressions which do not leave their trace.
It is necessary, if I may so phrase it, to urge men to live dangerously.
The adult is endangering his happiness if he believes that truth is what Karl Marx said, or Mussolini tells him, or the inferences of Mr Baldwin which the latter has in turn drawn from material prepared for him by the Research Department…
Happiness depends upon being able to approach with an open mind facts which have been prepared by independent persons who have no interest in seeing that their incidence is bent in some particular way.
Anything else imprisons the mind in dogmas which only work so long as that mind does not travel beyond the narrow confines within which the dogmas work.
The answer, of course, is the tragic one that there is no high-road to it.
But men like Mr Scott are rare enough to make reliance upon their emergence a very dubious ground of hope.
Nor need we deny that the growth of a professional spirit among journalists, their organization into a profession with standards of entrance and performance, will add greatly to the chances of solving the problem.
Outrageous propaganda kills itself; men do not believe the “papers” because they have found them lying at some point where the facts forced themselves upon attention.
People may come to see that where the quality of intelligence is concerned, the second-rate, the dull, the incurious, the routineer, simply will not do.
They may be prepared to make education a profession sufficiently well paid to attract the highest ability, and sufficiently honourable to satisfy the keenest ambition.
Do what we will, let him teach what he please, the minds with which he is in contact will go along with his mind, they will learn his enthusiasms, share his zest in inquiry.
Students who have lived with such men are their spiritual children not less than those who have learned the habits of a gentleman at Eton or a proper respect for the Emperor of Japan in Tokio.
And, equally, we may learn that a narrow patriotism in history and politics has social results less admirable than a quick scepticism built from the sense that our country has not always been right, our institutional standards not…
Our governors may be willing to admit that one inference from the rebellion of Washington is the possible legitimacy of rebellion, one inference even from the new theology of Jesus, that we are sometimes justified in the making of new…
It is even possible that the value of the power to think may become so much more widely recognized, that we shall not ask that those who are able creatively to teach this supreme art, be dismissed because we dislike either what they teach…
A political pattern has the same hold upon its votaries as a religion; the enthusiasts of Moscow and of Rome differ only in the object of their worship.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
