They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees,
without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh
evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are
made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest
prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the
only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens.
Everyone thinks of changing the
world, but no one thinks of changing himself. Leo Tolstoy
A critical
society is a community of people who value critical thinking and value those
who practice it. It is a society continually improving. Its most
distinguishing characteristic is its emphasis on thinking as the key to
the emancipation of the mind, to the creation of just practices, to the
preservation and development of the species.
Unfortunately
there are no critical societies in the world. Nor have there ever
been. The idea represents an ideal not yet achieved, a possibility not
yet actualized. There is no culture on earth where critical thought is
characteristic of everyday personal and social life.
On the
contrary, the world is filled with superficiality, prejudice, bias,
distortions, lies, deception, manipulation, short sightedness,
close-mindedness, righteousness, hypocrisy, on and on, in every culture in
every country throughout the world. These problems in thinking lead to
untold negative implications - fear, anxiety, sadness, hopelessness, pain,
suffering, injustices of every imaginable kind.
Yet humans
have great capacity for rationality and reasonability. The history of
human accomplishments, achievements and contributions well documents this
fact. But for the most part this capacity must be developed, actively, by
the mind. It is our second, not our first, nature.
What is more
natural to the mind, what comes first in terms of human tendencies, and
often takes precedence, is an orientation focused on self-gratification,
self-interest, self-protection. This perspective is innate, and many
would say, necessary for survival. Still it leads to many problems and
ultimately stands as a barrier to the development of fairminded critical
societies.
Many
important thinkers throughout history have contributed to the idea of the
critical society through emphasis on the educated mind, freedom of thought, the
cultivation of the intellect, and barriers to human development. We have pulled
together some quotes from these thinkers for you here, and provided some little
commentary in places. When we weave these ideas together with similar
ideas from other great thinkers, a rich tapestry emerges, a vibrant guiding
concept of the critical society. We see what we are reaching for, and the traps
to be avoided.
John Stuart Mill, an
important 19th century Utilitarian, concerned to help create a critical
society, feared conformism among the masses, what he saw as sheep-like
uniformity which imposed narrow parochial views and arbitrary rules on those
more enlightened. On Mill’s view, a critical society would necessarily
entail freedom of thought and the granting of fundamental human rights. In
speaking of human freedom, in his classic essay entitled On Liberty,
Mill says:
[The
appropriate region of human liberty] comprises, first, the inward domain of
consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense;
liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on
all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or
theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions…is
practically inseparable from it. Second, the principle requires liberty of
tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character;
of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow; without
impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them,
even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong…No
society in which these liberties are not, on the whole respected, is free,
whatever may be its form of government; and none is completely free in which they
do not exist absolute and unqualified. The only freedom which deserves the
name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not
attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain
it.
There is
also in the world at large an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the
powers of society over the individual, both by the forces of opinion and even
by that of legislation; and as the tendency of all the changes taking place in
the world is to strengthen society, and diminish the power of the individual,
this encroachment is not only of the evils which tend spontaneously to
disappear, but, on the contrary to grow more and more formidable. The
disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their
own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so
energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings
incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anyone
but want of power; and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a
strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must
expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase.
If all
mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary
opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than
he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind…the peculiar
evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human
race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the
opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they
are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; 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.
We can never
be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and
if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. First: the opinion
which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those
who desire to suppress it, of course, deny its truth; but they are not
infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind,
and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a
hearing to an opinion, because they are sure it is false, is assuming that
their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of
discussion is an assumption of infallibility…on any matter not self-evident,
there are ninety-nine persons incapable of judging of it for one who is
capable; and the capacity of the hundredth person is only comparative; for the
majority of the eminent men of every past generation held many opinions now
known to be erroneous, and did or approved numerous things which no one will
now justify.
To create a critical society, we
must foster educated minds. In 1851, John Henry Newman wrote his famous
set of lectures, Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education,
which in 1852 became The Idea of a University. Consider his conception
of the educated person, found in these lectures:
Truth, of
whatever kind, is the proper object of the intellect; its cultivation then lies
in fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth... the intellect in its
present state, ...does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We
know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by
piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by
the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual
adaptation, of many partial notions, by the employment, concentration, and
joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind. Such a union and
concert of the intellectual powers, such an enlargement and development, such a
comprehensiveness, is necessarily a matter of training. And again, such a
training is a matter of rule; it is not mere application, however
exemplary, which introduces the mind to truth, nor the reading of many books,
nor the getting up of many subjects, nor the witnessing many experiments, nor
attending many lectures. All this is short of enough; a man may have done it
all, yet be lingering in the vestibule of knowledge: he may not realize what
his mouth utters; he may not see with his mental eye what confronts him; he may
have no grasp of things as they are; or at least he may have no power at all of
advancing one step forward of himself, in consequence of what he has already
acquired, no power of discriminating between truth and falsehood, of sifting
out the grains of truth from the mass, of arranging things according to the
their real value. Such a power is an acquired faculty of judgment, of
clearsightedness, of sagacity, of wisdom, ...and of intellectual
self-possession and repose - qualities which do not come of mere acquirement. The
eye of the mind, of which the object is truth, is the work of discipline and
habit.
I will tell
you, Gentlemen, what has been the practical error of the last twenty years –
not to load the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge, but
to force upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been the error
of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects;
of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is not shallowness,
which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not; of considering an
acquaintance with the learned names of things and persons, and the possession
of the clever duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent lecturers, and membership
with scientific institutions, and the sight of the experiments of a platform
and the specimens of a museum, that all this was not dissipation of mind, but
progress. All things now are to be learned at once, not first one thing
and then the other, not one well, but many badly. Learning is to be
without exertion, without attention, without toil; without grounding, without
advance, without finishing. There is to be nothing individual in it; and
this, forsooth, is the wonder of the age. What the steam engine does with
matter, the printing press is to do with the mind; it is to act mechanically,
and the population is to be passively, almost unconsciously enlightened.
I protest to
you, Gentlemen, that if I had to choose between a so-called University, which
dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its degrees to
any person who passed an examination in a wide range of subjects, and a
University which had no professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a
number of young men together for three or four years, and then sent them away
as the University of Oxford is said to have done some sixty years since, if I
were asked which of these two methods was the better discipline of the
intellect…if I must determine which of the two courses was the more successful
in training, moulding, enlarging the mind, which sent out men the more fitted
for their secular duties, which produced better public men, men of the world,
men whose names would descend to posterity, I have no hesitation in giving the
preference to that University which did nothing, over that which exacted of its
members an acquaintance with every science under the sun.
All I say
is, call things by their right names, and do not confuse together ideas which
are essentially different. A thorough knowledge of one science and a
superficial acquaintance with many, are not the same thing; a smattering of a
hundred things or a memory for detail, is not a philosophical or comprehensive
view. Recreations are not education; accomplishments are not education. Do
not say, the people must be educated, when, after all, you only mean, amused,
refreshed, soothed, put into good spirits and good humour, or kept from vicious
excesses. I do not say that such amusements, such occupations of mind, are not
a great gain; but they are not education. You may as well call drawing and
fencing education, as a general knowledge of botany or conchology.
Stuffing
birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to
the idle, but it is not education; it does not form or cultivate the intellect.
Education is
a high word; it is the preparation for knowledge, and it is the imparting of
knowledge in proportion to that preparation. We require intellectual eyes to
know withal, as bodily eyes for sight. We need both objects and organs
intellectual; we cannot gain them without setting about it; we cannot gain them
in our sleep, or by hap-hazard .
...the
intellect, which has been disciplined to the perfection of its powers, which
knows, and thinks while it knows, which has learned to leaven the dense mass of
facts and events with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot be
partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot
but be patient, collected and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in
every beginning, the origin in every end, the law in every interruption, the
limit in each delay; because it ever knows where it stands, and how its path
lies from one point to another .
It is
education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and
judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a
force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go
right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is
sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill
any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how
to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of
mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to
an understanding with them, how to bear with them.. ...he knows when to speak
and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask
a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to
impart himself.
In 1906, Sumner wrote his
seminal book, Folkways, in which he detailed the arbitrary nature of
social rules, customs, taboos and morays. In it, he envisioned the
critical society:
The critical
habit of thought, if usual in society, will pervade all its mores, because it
is a way of taking up the problems of life. Men educated in it cannot be
stampeded by stump orators ... They are slow to believe. They can hold things
as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They
can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or
confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can
resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education
in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said
that it makes good citizens.
[Critical
thinking is] . . . the examination and test of propositions of any kind which
are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to
reality or not. The critical faculty is a product of education and training. It
is a mental habit and power. It is a prime condition of human welfare that men
and women should be trained in it. It is our only guarantee against delusion,
deception, superstition, and misapprehension of ourselves and our earthly
circumstances.
In the book,
Ideas and Opinions (1954), Einstein points to the problem of teaching to
specialties rather than generalizable knowledge and critical thinking.
I want to
oppose the idea that the school has to teach directly that special knowledge
and those accomplishments, which one has to use later directly in life The
demands of life are much too manifold to let such as specialized training in
school appear possible. ..The school should always have as its aim that the
young man leave it as a harmonious personality, not as a specialist…The
development of general ability for independent thinking and judgment should
always be placed foremost, not the acquisition of special knowledge. It a
person masters the fundamentals of his subject and has learned to think and
work independently, he will surely find his way and besides will better be able
to adapt himself to progress and changes than the person whose training
principally consists in the acquiring of detailed knowledge.
It is not
enough to teach a man a speciality. Through it he may become a kind of
useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is
essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for
values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally
good. Otherwise he – with his specialized knowledge – more closely
resembles a well trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must
learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their
sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to the individual
fellow-men and to the community…Overemphasis on the competitive system and
premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit
on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included. It is
also vital to a valuable education that independent critical thinking be
developed in the young human being, a development that is greatly jeopardized
by overburdening him with too much and with too varied subjects. Overburdening
necessarily leads to superficiality.
It is not
the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but
the urge to understand, the intellectual work creative or receptive.
In the
following passage, Einstein illuminates the importance of intellectual autonomy
to the creation of critical societies:
Only the
individual can think, and thereby create new values for society, nay, even set
up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without
creative personalities able to think and judge independently, the upward
development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the community…In
politics not only are leaders lacking, but the independence of spirit and the
sense of justice of the citizen have to a great extent declined…In two weeks
the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into
such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill
and be killed…the present manifestations of decadence are explained by the fact
that economic and technologic developments have highly intensified the struggle
for existence, greatly to the detriment of the free development of the individual.
In an open
letter to the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, Einstein
emphasizes the importance of individual responsibility in living an ethical life:
The problem
of how man should act if his government prescribes actions or society expects
an attitude which his own conscience considers wrong is indeed an old
one. It is easy to say that the individual cannot be held responsible for
acts carried out under irresistible compulsion, because the individual is fully
dependent upon the society in which he is living and therefore must accept its
rules. But the very formulation of this idea makes it obvious to what
extent such a concept contradicts our sense of justice. External
compulsion can, to a certain extent, reduce but never cancel the responsibility
of the individual. In the
With regard
to social conformity, Einstein says:
…there is
such a thing as a spirit of the times, an attitude of mind characteristic of a
particular generation, which is passed on from individual to individual and
gives its distinctive mark to a society. Each of us has to do his little
bit toward transforming this spirit of the times…Let every man judge by
himself, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him .
In the following passages, Bertrand
Russell, one of the most influential 20th century philosophers, emphasizes the
importance of open and free inquiry. He stresses the critical need to
create education systems that foster fairminded pursuit of knowledge and warns
of the dangers inherent in dogmatic ideologies.
The
conviction that it is important to believe this or that, even if a free inquiry
would not support the belief, is one which is common to almost all religions
and which inspires all systems of state education...A habit of basing
convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty
which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills
from which the world is suffering. But at present, in most countries,
education aims at preventing the growth of such a habit, and men who refuse to
profess belief in some system of unfounded dogmas are not considered suitable
as teachers of the young…
The world
that I should wish to see would be one freed from the virulence of group
hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived
rather from cooperation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in
which education aimed at mental freedom rather than at imprisoning the minds of
the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life
against the shafts of impartial evidence. The world needs open hearts and
open minds, and it is not through rigid systems, whether old or new, that these
can be derived.
The
conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an
extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their
sadism which they believe to be legitimate, and even noble. It is not only
in regard to sexual behavior but also in regard to knowledge on sex subjects
that the attitude of Christians is dangerous to human welfare. Every
person who has taken the trouble to study the question in an unbiased spirit
knows that the artificial ignorance on sex subjects which orthodox Christians
attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dangerous to mental and physical
health, and causes in those who pick up their knowledge by the way of
“improper” talk, as most children do, an attitude that sex is in itself
indecent and ridiculous. I do not think there can be any defense for the
view that knowledge is ever undesirable. I should not put barriers in the
way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age. A person is
much less likely to act wisely when he is ignorant than when he is instructed,
and it is ridiculous to give young people a sense of sin because they have a
natural curiosity about an important matter…There is no rational ground of any
sort or kind for keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may wish to know,
whether on sex or any other matter. And we shall never get a sane
population until this fact is recognized in early education, which is
impossible so long as the churches are able to control educational politics .
Emma Goldman, an important
early 20th century activist in the US, argued for, among other things, the
right to free speech, the right of women to obtain and use birth control, and
the rights of the worker to better conditions and a more fair economic
system. She was arrested so often that "she never spoke in public
without taking along a book to read in jail (Goldman, p. 3)." In the
following passage, she comments on oppressive government, mindless conformity,
stratification within society, and sham democracy (as barriers to critical
societies):
I have often
been asked why I maintained such a noncompromising antagonism to government and
in what way I have found myself oppressed by it. In my opinion every individual
is hampered by it. It exacts taxes from production. It creates tariffs, which
prevent free exchange. It stands ever for the status quo and traditional
conduct and belief. It comes into private lives and into most intimate personal
relations, enabling the superstitious, puritanical, and distorted ones to
impose their ignorant prejudice and moral servitudes upon the sensitive, the
imaginative, and the free spirits. Government does this by its divorce laws,
its moral censorships, and by a thousand petty persecutions of those who are
too honest to wear the moral mask of respectability. In addition,
government protects the strong at the expense of the weak, provides courts and
laws which the rich may scorn and the poor must obey. It enables the predatory
rich to make wars to provide foreign markets for the favored ones, with
prosperity for the rulers and wholesale death for the ruled. However, it is not
only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every
individual value and quality. It is the whole complex of authority and
institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth,
pretense, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional
domination. It is the reverence for these institutions instilled in the school,
the Church, and the home in order that man may believe and obey without
protest. Such a process of devitalizing and distorting personalities of the
individual and of whole communities may have been a part of historical
evolution; but it should be strenuously combated by every honest and
independent mind in an age which has any pretense to enlightenment .
It has often been suggested to me that the Constitution of the
In
Thinking is
skilled work. It is not true that we are naturally endowed with the
ability to think clearly and logically – without learning how, or without
practicing. It is ridiculous to suppose that any
less skill is required for thinking than for carpentering, or for playing
tennis, golf, or bridge, or for playing some musical instrument. People
with untrained minds should no more expect to think clearly and logically than
those people who have never learnt and never practiced can expect to find
themselves good carpenters, golfers, bridge-players, or pianists. Yet our
world is full of people who apparently do suppose that thinking is entirely
unskilled work; that thinking clearly and accurately is so easy and so “natural”
that “anybody can think;” and that any person’s thinking is quite as reliable
as any other person’s. This accounts for the fact that, as a people, we
are so much less efficient in this respect than we are in our sports. For
nobody assumes that any game is so easy that we are all first-class players
“naturally,” without having to learn how to play or without practice.
In 1976, Erich Fromm, wrote a
book entitled To Have or To Be, in which he illuminated the problem of
seeking meaning and happiness through material possessions and control over
nature, through harnessing resources for human benefit. He says:
The Great
Promise of Unlimited Progress – the promise of domination of nature, of
material abundance, of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and of
unimpeded personal freedom – has sustained the hopes and faith of the
generations since the beginning of the industrial age…With industrial
progress…we could feel that we were on our way to unlimited production, and
hence, unlimited consumption…that science made us omniscient. We were on
our way to becoming gods, supreme beings who could create a second world, using
the natural world only as building locks for our new creation…the industrial
age has failed to fulfill its Great Promise, and ever growing numbers of people
are becoming aware that:
- unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not
conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum
pleasure.
- The dream of being independent masters of our
lives ended when we began awakening to the fact that we have all become
clogs in the bureaucratic machine, with our thoughts, feelings, and tastes
manipulated by government and industry and the mass communications they
control.
- Economic progress has remained restricted to the
rich nations, and the gap between rich and poor nations has ever widened.
- Technical progress itself has created ecological
dangers and the dangers of nuclear war, either or both of which may put an
end to all civilization and possibly all life.
[One
premise] of the industrial age, that the pursuit of individual egoism leads to
harmony and peace, growth in everyone’s welfare, is…erroneous…To be an egoist
refers not only to my behavior but to my character. It means: that I want
everything for myself; that possessing, not sharing, gives me pleasure; that I
must become greedy because if my aim is having, I am more the more I have;
that I must feel antagonistic toward all others; my customers whom I want to
deceive, my competitors whom I want to destroy, my workers whom I want to
exploit. I can never be satisfied, because there is no end to my wishes; I
must be envious of those who have more and afraid of those who have less. But
I have to repress all these feelings in order to represent myself (to others a
well as to myself). As the smiling, rational, sincere, kind human being
everybody pretends to be.
H.L. Mencken
In the early
20th century, H.L Menken, one of the most distinguished journalist in
I
believe in liberty. And when I say liberty, I mean the thing in its widest
imaginable sense — liberty up to the extreme limits of the feasible and
tolerable. I am against forbidding anybody to do anything, or say
anything, or think anything so long as it is at all possible to imagine a
habitable world in which he would be free to do, say, and think it. The burden
of proof, as I see it, is always upon the policeman, which is to say, upon the
lawmaker, the theologian, the right-thinker. He must prove his case doubly,
triply, quadruply, and then he must start all over and prove it again. The eye
through which I view him is watery and jaundiced. I do not pretend to be “just”
to him — any more than a Christian pretends to be just to the devil. He is the
enemy of everything I admire and respect in this world — of everything that
makes it various and amusing and charming. He impedes every honest search for
the truth. He stands against every sort of good-will and common decency. His
ideal is that of an animal trainer, an archbishop, a major general in the army.
I am against him until the last galoot’s ashore.
In 1913, John Bury, Regius Professor
of Modern History at
It is a
common saying that thought is free. A man can never be hindered from thinking
whatever he chooses so long as he conceals what he thinks. The working of his
mind is limited only by the bounds of his experience and the power of his
imagination. But this natural liberty of private thinking is of little value. It
is unsatisfactory and even painful to the thinker himself, if he is not
permitted to communicate his thoughts to others, and it is obviously of no
value to his neighbours. Moreover it is extremely difficult to hide thoughts
that have any power over the mind. If a man’s thinking leads him to call in
question ideas and customs which regulate the behaviour of those about him, to
reject beliefs which they hold, to see better ways of life than those they
follow, it is almost impossible for him, if he is convinced of the truth of his
own reasoning, not to betray by silence, chance words, or general attitude that
he is different from them and does not share their opinions. Some have
preferred, like Socrates, some would prefer to-day, to face death rather than
conceal their thoughts. Thus freedom of thought, in any valuable sense,
includes freedom of speech.
It has taken
centuries to persuade the most enlightened peoples that liberty to publish
one’s opinions and to discuss all questions is a good and not a bad thing. Human
societies (there are some brilliant exceptions) have been generally opposed to
freedom of thought, or, in other words, to new ideas, and it is easy to see
why.
Bury also
sees people as intellectually indolent, narrowminded and especially averse to
ideas that threaten the status quo and established ways of thinking.
The average
brain is naturally lazy and tends to take the line of least resistance. The
mental world of the ordinary man consists of beliefs which he has accepted
without questioning and to which he is firmly attached; he is instinctively
hostile to anything which would upset the established order of this familiar
world. A new idea, inconsistent with some of the beliefs which he holds, means
the necessity of rearranging his mind; and this process is laborious, requiring
a painful expenditure of brain-energy. To him and his fellows, who form the
vast majority, new ideas, and opinions which cast doubt on established beliefs
and institutions, seem evil because they are disagreeable.
....novel opinions are felt to be dangerous as well as annoying, and any one
who asks inconvenient questions about the why and the wherefore of accepted
principles is considered a pestilent person.
The psychological motives which produce a conservative spirit hostile to new
ideas are reinforced by the active opposition of certain powerful sections of
the community, such as a class, a caste, or a priesthood, whose interests are
bound up with the maintenance of the established order and the ideas on which
it rests.
A long time was needed to arrive at the conclusion that coercion of opinion is
a mistake, and only a part of the world is yet convinced. That conclusion, so
far as I can judge, is the most important ever reached by men.
Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891)
was an important political activist of the 19th century. He founded the
National Secular Society in 1866. As a member of Parliament in
Laws to
punish differences of opinion are as useless as they are monstrous. Differences
of opinion on politics are denounced and punished as seditious, on religions
topics as blasphemous, and on social questions as immoral and obscene. Yet
the sedition, blasphemy, and immorality punished in one age are often found to
be the accepted, and sometimes admired, political, religious, and social teaching
of a mored educated period. Heresies are the evidence of some attempt on
the part of men to find opinions for themselves.
In the mid
19th century, a secularist movement was underway in
According to McGee,
A set or
doctrines for the early Secularists was proclaimed by Holyoake, when he
announced the formation of the "Central Secular Society and urged the
founding of a network of local Secular bodies in affiliation with it. Inasmuch
as it was in response to this utterance, and the announcement and invitation
accompanying it, that bodies calling themselves "Secular" societies
sprang into existence, the statement may be accepted as an expression of the
views held by the early Secularists. The "Principle" of the society
is defined as "the recognition of the 'Secular' sphere as the province of
man," and its "Aims" are said to be:
"1. To explain that science is the sole Providence of Man -- a truth which is calculated to enable a man to become master of his own Fate, and protects him from dependencies that allure him
from his duty, unnerve his arm in difficulty, and betray him in danger.
"2. To establish the proposition that Morals are independent of Christianity; in other words, to show that wherever there is a moral end proposed, there is a secular path to it.
"3. To encourage men to trust Reason throughout, and to trust nothing that Reason does not establish -- to examine all things hopeful, respect all things probable, but rely upon
nothing without precaution which does not come within the range of science and experience.
"4. To teach men that the universal fair and open discussion of opinion is the highest guarantee of public truth -- that only that theory which is submitted to that ordeal is to be regarded,
since only that which endures it can be trusted.
"5, To claim for every man the fullest liberty of thought and action compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other person.
"6. To maintain -- that, from the uncertainty as to whether the inequalities of human condition will be compensated for in another life -- It is the business of intelligence to rectify them in this world; and consequently, that instead of indulging in speculative worship of supposed superior beings, a generous man will devote himself to the patient service of known inferior natures, and the mitigation of harsh destiny, so that the ignorant may be enlightened and the low elevated." [G.J. Holyoake, "Organization of Freethinkers" (1852)]
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