THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE: Truth and Self-Censorship
Scruton, Roger
HEN JOHN STUART MILL gave his famous defense of free opinion in On Liberty, he was careful to point out that errors are not only inevitable, they are also beneficial, provided we are able to...
...tion” that has as much claim to social endorsement as the heterosexual alternative...
...posterity as well as the existing generation...
...Yet today, 40 years on from the Civil Rights Act, the picture is very different—horrifyingly so—with 70 percent of black children born out of wedlock, escalating crime rates, and a steep relative decline in school performance...
...The suggestions that homosexual desire is different in kind from heterosexual desire, that it has adverse medical, social, or psychological consequences, that it poses a threat to children or to new recruits that is not posed by the traditional alternative—all such suggestions are anathema...
...That elegant way of saying that we learn from our mistakes has the merit of showing why we learn from them and how.The greatest mistake in politics was that made by Lenin, when he set about destroying the institutions in which opposition could express itself: the mistake of making it impossible to perceive one’s own mistakes...
...The concept is vague, without boundaries: Almost anybody can be pushed into its ring of fire...
...But if any one of them is right, then the orthodoxy upon which the fabric of “gay rights” has come to rest will begin to crumble...
...Roger Scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (Continuum...
...The best way to protect yourself, when others are making angry accusations, is to agree with the accuser and deflect the accusation from yourself by accusing a third party...
...But nowhere, to my knowledge, is there a department of psychology, of medicine, still less of philosophy or literature, where the truth about homosexuality and about its social, psychological, and medical consequences is impartially studied...
...Foucault’s History of Sexuality, according to which all “problematization” of the sexual act merely reflects the interests of those with social power and has no other source of validity, is widely regarded as the supremely authoritative text, to deviate from which is to lose credibility, respectability, and, in the extreme case, tenure...
...Of course, the suggestions may be wrong...
...Of course, that suggestion might be wrong, and I am not committing myself to its truth—although it is common sense to suggest that, if you reward bad behavior, then bad behavior will increase...
...And in order that the defense mechanism should be complete, people hit on the concept of “homophobia,” in order to express their militant orthodoxy and their determination to root out the real social evil...
...if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error...
...Immediately the same pre-emptive spasm of exculpation arose...
...And far too much has been invested in the received opinion to permit it to be questioned...
...And it is motivated, as a rule, by the knowledge of error...
...It took 70 years for the resulting machine without feedback to crash—but 60 million people had to die before it did so...
...If we discourage dissent, we perpetuate error...
...Mill’s observation remains valid...
...you invent a concealed social evil, institutional racism, and dedicate yourself to its eradication...
...However, a vast investment has been made in that official explanation, which defines a comfortable whitewash for the liberal conscience, as well as a lucrative source of income for the rent-seekers of the social services...
...Yet it simply cannot be true...
...Maybe we must resign ourselves to living in a censored environment, and look for those “little platoons” of free inquiry which exist among friends, and in which the only settled agreement is the agreement to differ...
...The safest thing, when the issue of black-white relations is in the offing, is to declare your orthodoxy in the loudest possible terms, maybe attacking, if you can, the nearest person at whom the charge of racism might be leveled, however implausibly...
...People have witnessed the punishments inflicted on the unorthodox, who are accused of racism or (in the case of Thomas Sowell) “Uncle-Tomism” and duly anathematized...
...The same dynamic can be witnessed in the matter of homosexuality, the official view of which is that it is neither a perversion nor a disorder, but an “orientaR O G E R S C R U T O N Today, 40 years on from the Civil Rights Act, the picture is very different— horrifyingly so—with 70 percent of black children born out of wedlock...
...The official explanation of such facts just has to be wrong...
...But such methods can be equally effective, since society begins from agreement and usually ends there...
...However, people have not learned the lesson of that, or of any other experience of censorship...
...ONE, OF GREAT CONCERN to Americans, is the issue of the behavior and prospects of African Americans...
...Those who suggest that welfare benefits might be the cause of the problem, rather than the solution to it, risk having their heads bitten off, and will certainly find themselves marginalized in any academic community...
...But this no longer happens...
...The remedy is to reverse the process whereby blacks were reduced to second-class citizens, and this we can do through subsidies, welfare benefits, and reverse discrimination...
...If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth...
...It can enforce orthodoxies only through marginalizing those who defy them...
...And others immediately responded with pre-emptive excuses...
...Hence the slightest divergence from orthodoxy can be singled out and punished, by the one who wishes to show his impeccable liberal credentials...
...Look at the academic literature on homosexuality and you won’t find a whisper of disapproval, and the disturbing medical and social statistics are glossed over as though they are barely worth a mention...
...Does this matter...
...So great is the censorship surrounding this and the related issue of race that we are beginning to witness a kind of “pre-emptive cringe” on the part of the liberal conscience whenever the issue is remotely likely to be raised...
...For if you did notice it, you would also notice just how far you had gone down the path of error...
...The point is that, if we are not prepared to consider such an argument, we are merely protecting as orthodoxy a belief whose falsehood may be the root cause of the problem...
...Movements to silence opinion, or to enforce orthodoxy, are almost as strong in a democratic culture as they are in a totalitarian tyranny.Of course, a democratic society does not dispose of the same threats and punishments...
...As he put it: “the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race...
...What Mill did not sufficiently emphasize, however, is that the discouraging of dissent is always profoundly motivated...
...As soon as the trial was announced 88 faculty members joined the calumny, adding their signatures to a letter whose main purpose was less the pursuit of justice than the urgent need to declare the impeccable orthodoxy of those who had rushed to sign it...
...As a result the academy today is full of courses dedicated to the normalization of homosexuality, as a lifestyle and a culture...
...That is why conversations with strangers start with remarks about the weather: they are remarks guaranteed to elicit agreement, and so to establish a bond...
...The official view, endorsed by the liberal media and the academic T H E P U R S U I T O F K N O W L E D G E 6 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Truth and Self-Censorship by Roger Scruton W DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 6 3 establishment, is that the poor performance of African-American children in school and college, the disproportionate rates of crime and delinquency among African-American adolescents, and the breakdown of the African-American family are all the long-term effect of slavery and racial discrimination...
...You look around for the real racist...
...It is precisely when people have invested in errors that they are afraid of the truth, and therefore eager to silence those who proclaim it...
...A political career will not survive this punishment, nor as a rule will a career in journalism or the academy...
...This can be witnessed in all the areas of policy where debate has been frozen, and it is instructive to study two salient examples...
...Maybe the Internet will help us—but again, I doubt it, having witnessed the ease in which orthodoxies are propagated through those supposedly impartial sources like Wikipedia, which are not impartial at all, but merely hostage to majority opinion, and never more hostage than when the majority is wrong...
...Likewise, those who first protested against the unjust treatment of homosexuals in our society expressed themselves with understandable indignation...
...You become first in the ranks of name-callers and search for the slightest evidence of dissent in order to seize the opportunity to show that you too are angry, you too are on the side of the victim, you too are prepared to go to the barricades in the cause and to denounce the culprits...
...The fact that you are behaving like a coward, taking the softest option and in the course of it committing the greatest injustice to a new class of victim —namely the one whom you are prepared to ruin rather than listen to—is a fact that you fail to notice...
...This we witnessed in the singularly distressing case of the Duke lacrosse team, members of which were falsely accused of rape by a black stripper, in a case that threatened to put the whole university on show as a white supremacist enclave...
...Right up until the 1950s, blacks, who were struggling against undeniable prejudice and discrimination and were economically disadvantaged as a result, held together as families, often set a model of good behavior, and were hardly more disposed to crime than their white contemporaries...
...Well, I have given two cases where it seems to me that the growing censoriousness of modern democracies has mattered greatly, and will go on to matter even more, as errors become too deeply embedded to be corrected...
...those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it...
...Imagine a society in which all conversations began with a declaration of political convictions: it would be a society on the brink of civil war...
...For it is in the academy that orthodoxies now arise, taking advantage of the new forms of scholarship, the easily invented intellectual “disciplines” designed to protect rather than to examine a prejudice, and the career structure in which dissent can be marked down as intellectual incompetence...
...ORTHODOXIES EMERGE from indignation: People, rightly protesting against racial prejudice, expressed their championship of American blacks in angry ways...
...We all know that it is dangerous to dissent from that orthodoxy...
...T H E P U R S U I T O F K N O W L E D G E 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Look at the academic literature on homosexuality and you won’t find a whisper of disapproval...
...HEN JOHN STUART MILL gave his famous defense of free opinion in On Liberty, he was careful to point out that errors are not only inevitable, they are also beneficial, provided we are able to confess to them...
...We used to think that academies had the purpose of protecting free enquiry, however shocking or disturbing its results, precisely so that errors propagated in the surrounding culture will eventually be brought to book and eliminated...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
