What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers. Although other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. Anyone who has experience of lecturing and debating knows them off backwards. It is with the second process that I am concerned here.įreedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about. The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by vague economic forces, and at the same time it is undermined by those who should be its defenders. ‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a ‘Don't’ at the beginning of each line. His outlook was summed up in the words of the Revivalist hymn: A heretic - political, moral, religious, or aesthetic - was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he's in the right. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape.
The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favor of censorship. Nor was there any mention of the various books which have been ‘killed’ in England and the United States during the war. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. Moral liberty - the liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print - seemed to be generally approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Of the speeches from the body of the hall, some reverted to the question of obscenity and the laws that deal with it, others were simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defense of the Russian purges. One of them delivered a speech which did deal with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to India another said, hesitantly, and in very general terms, that liberty was a good thing a third delivered an attack on the laws relating to obscenity in literature. There were four speakers on the platform. Milton's famous phrase about the sin of ‘killing’ a book was printed on the leaflets advertising the meeting which had been circulated beforehand. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton's Aeropagitica - a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defense of freedom of the press.
About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N.
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