The Free Thinker

C.S. Lewis on Religious Persecution

From God in the Dock:

Question 15: In the past the Church used various kinds of compulsion in attempts to force a particular brand of Christianity on the community. Given sufficient power, is there not a danger of this sort of thing happening again?

Lewis: Yes, I hear nasty rumors coming from Spain. Persecution is a temptation to which all men are exposed. I had a postcard signed 'M.D.' saying that anyone who expressed and published his belief in the Virgin Birth should be stripped and flogged. That shows you how easily persecution of Christians by the non-Christians might come back. Of course, they wouldn't call it Persecution: they'd call it 'Compulsory re-education of the ideologically unfit,' or something like that. But, of course, I have to admit that Christians themselves have been persecutors in the past. It was worse of them, because they ought to have known better: they weren't worse in any other way. I detest every kind of religious compulsion: only the other day I was writing an angry letter to The Spectator about Church Parades in the Home Guard!

The best part of this is Lewis's remark that Christians should have known better than to be persecutors. It is a bit hard to understand how a religion whose central narrative is the Crucifixion could so often have emulated Caiaphas.

Censorship and Public Opinion

Suppose you're a dictator, and you want public opinion to have a certain structure.  That is, on each of an array of salient questions, you want certain views to be widespread, and certain other views to be scarce or non-existent.  Most obviously, you want people to have a sufficiently favorable opinion of yourself to support you, and certainly not to rebel against you.  You may not-- at least not at first, before power has gone to your head-- want to insist that they idolize you or regard you as some sort of infallible, quasi-divine hero.  You might even recognize your own fallibility and be glad to have a limited amount of loyal opposition to protect you from your own mistakes.  You want people to be in favor of the law and against corruption... though perhaps not too strongly, since you might want to break your own laws, and you don't want the inevitable corruption of some of your officials to serve as a pretext for your overthrow.  You want people, perhaps, to be religious, to the extent that religion undergirds the social order, but not enough for religious leaders to be able to de-legitimize you at will.  You want people to hate your country's enemies, but not to carry xenophobia to the extent of being unable to ape useful foreign ideas or innovations.  You enjoy the arts yourself and you know that they help the people to enjoy life, so you want artists to go on working; you may even want the arts to flourish in a certain way.  You know that many heads are better than one, so you don't want to turn your whole citizenry into mindless parrots.  In short, you want to affect the climate of public discourse, to set limits to it, without making it stifling; to prune (varying the metaphor) the tree of culture, while keeping it fruitful.  Can you achieve this?

One factor that makes it difficult is that the costs of speech acts are affected by other speech acts.  Think of the decision to speak as a quasi-economic decision, in which individuals act as rational agents weighing costs and benefits.  Among the costs and benefits are praise (a benefit) and blame (a cost) from others.  Of course, the praising and blaming are themselves speech acts, made by other individuals on rational grounds, taking into account costs and benefits.  A person's real beliefs also affect the content of their speech acts, in (at least) two (potential) ways: (1) a person may experience the disutility of cognitive dissonance if they express opinions which are not their own, and (2) it is easier to express one's real beliefs than to express false beliefs (which involves not only efforts of imagination, but also risks of inconsistency: you have to keep track of your own lies, lest you be caught contradicting yourself).  Of course, over time, speech acts will affect beliefs.

Now, suppose a dictator penalizes a certain kind of speech act.  For example, Hitler puts limits on the degree of approval of the English that may be expressed.  The first effect is to greatly reduce the amount of excessively pro-English speech.  However, pro-English speech acts also affect the cost of anti-English speech acts.  For a ferocious Anglophobe, one of the costs of speaking his mind is that he may be loudly scorned by ardent Anglophiles.  If the strongest Anglophiles now find it expedient to lay low, the English-haters will feel more free to speak out.  That, in turn, raises the cost of speech for moderate Anglophiles, who may begin to keep quiet, not because they are afraid of the law-- they are not so pro-English as to offend the police-- but because of the unpleasantness of being contradicted and insulted by newly noisy Anglophobes, and because they find they don't get the praise they use to enjoy from the stronger Anglophiles.  If (a) the underlying distribution of real attitudes towards England remains constant in the short run, (b) there is diminishing marginal utility of speech for all speakers, and (c) dissimulation is costly, there should be some equilibrium at which a new climate of political discourse is stable.  But it will not simply be the ex ante climate of discourse minus its most ardently pro-English wing.  The center of gravity of the discourse climate will probably shift more than the dictator wants in the short run, and even more so in the long run, as the new climate of discourse changes the distribution of underlying attitudes.

I think a model along these lines could explain a lot.  G.K. Chesterton, admiring Thomas Aquinas, lambasts the later medieval schoolmen for the way they trivialized his intellectual legacy and brought it into disrepute.  But the reason is not far to seek!  The Catholic Church made the fatal mistake of not respecting freedom of thought.  To think was to risk being defined as a heretic.  So of course thinkers took less risky, and so less brave, less creative, more trivial lines of thought, retreating from substance into syllogisms.  In similar fashion, Soviet thinkers excelled in mathematics but not economics or history.  In contemporary Russia, the government regulates the liberal press, with the effect, not wholly intended I think, of giving more space for forms of nationalistic illiberalism which the liberal (in the broadest sense) media of the West effectively excoriate.  And in the Muslim world, governments that muzzle pro-democratic voices end up fueling Islamist extremism that is dangerous even to them.

What Does Free Speech Mean to You?

Roger Kimball, writing at RealClearPolitics, quotes with disdain and outrage the following words from President Bollinger of Columbia justifying their decision to allow Ahmadinejad to speak:

I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas--to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most, or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason.

I would also like to invoke a major theme in the development of freedom of speech as a central value in our society. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life--and a civil society--prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation's most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world. This is America at its best.

His reaction:

President Bollinger's sophomoric conception of free speech is precisely the sort of supine intellectualism that, if consistently embraced, would make free speech impossible...  It would be interesting to know where Columbia would draw the line. In a breathtaking interview on Fox News, Columbia Dean John Coatsworth cheerfully affirmed that, were Adolf Hitler in New York and willing to engage in "discussion" and "debate," Columbia "would certainly invite him." Who would doubt it?

It "would make free speech impossible?"  What a baffling claim!  How would this bizarre eventuality come about, pray tell?  If the US military were disbanded, maybe.  But how could Ahmadinejad be a threat to freedom on a podium.  Perhaps it's a propaganda coup for Iran, perhaps not; as Bollinger implies, Iranians might think, "Wow! And we would never allow Bush to give a speech here."  It seems rather a show of strength, actually: your ideology is so unconvincing that you can preach it as much as you want, right here in one of our leading university.  We're really not worried.  Bollinger is absolutely right: we can win an argument against our enemies any day of the week, and that's an important advantage, let's use it.  Funny, Bollinger sounds like Bush.