FREEDOM

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 72, Issue 6240, 10 June 1946, Page 6

FREEDOM

A WORD DIFFICULT TO DEFINE ITS APPLICATION TO THE P.RESS “ John o’ London,” writing to Gog and Magog in a recent issue of John o’ London's Weekly, states:— One of the most extraordinary facts in human history is that outside the exact sciences few, if any, questions that are worth, answering have ever been /answered once and for all. Pilate is assumed to have been jesting when he asked, “What is truth ?” But it is a question that can still be asked in all seriousness, and it is unlikely that the philosophers will all agree as to the answer. Many of us would be ready to answer the question “ What is justice ? ” but our definitions would in somie cases at least contradict each other. Plato did not settle the matter in The Republic, and I do not think it will ever be settled unless Utopia actually comes to earth. Tolstoy startled the intellectual world at the end of the last century with his attempt to answer the question, “ Wfiat is art ? ” And the recent excitement about Picasso showed that the question is still an open one.

Among all the words that are difficult to define, none is more difficult than “ freedom.” What seems freedom to one man seeing slavery to another. In the middle of the nineteenth century most people would have said that England was a free country, and it was a common boast that even a slave, as soon as he set foot on British soil, became a free man. Yet many people denied that England was a free country. Political freedom.—the freedom to vote, in particular—did not exist for large masses of the people.

To-day men are squabbling about the definition of freedom as though no one had ever considered the matter before. Many of them give their own definition confidently, as though the question were finally settled at last. The Russian Revolution has made an enormous difference to thought on the subject. One would imagine at times as one listens to the disputants that a new kind of freedom had come into the world with Lenin, and that that is the only real freedom.

Others, of course, deny this, and even talk of Russia as a country that in its lack of freedom is more akin to Nazi Germany than to contemporary England. The Russian view of freedom has influenced the thoughts of numerous people, not only in regard to economic freedom, but in regard to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In England freedom of speech has seemed in the popular mind to be in the very air that Englishmen breathe. “We must be free or die,” Wordsworth said, “ who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals that Milton held,” and even intellectuals who detest Milton’s Puritanism wax enthusiastic over his defence of the freedom of the press in “ Areopagitica.” One would have gathered from some of the writings on the subject that it was mainly the dramatic censorship that had prevented new Shakespeares from appearing in later centuries. The art of the drama, we were told, was being hamstrung by official malice, and it was impossible to expect masterpieces from dramatists who were writing in chains.

The dramatic censorship had certainly become a curious institution toward the end of the reign of Queen Victoria. The censor seemed willing to pass all kinds of obscenity in musical burlesques, and to see nothing to bring a blush to the cheek of innocence in adaptations of French farces that were at least as offensive to ordinary notions as the Restoration comedies that have since become so popular in the London theatre. The censor seemed to become really shocked only by plays written by serious dramatists about serious problems/ |

He was shock-proof in regard to the “ suggestiveness,” as it was called, of some musical comedies — though the best musical comedies could seldom be called “ blue ” —but Ibsen’s “ Ghosts ” and Shaw’s “ Widowers’ Houses,” apparently, made him blush to the roots of his hair. Even so, I think, the bad effect of the censorship of plays was greatly exaggerated. Now that it has become all but non-existent in practice, great plays seems to be as rare as ever—even rarer, indeed—-and only one or two of the censored plays of the past have been thought good enough to be worth reviving. I doubt whether the modern dramatic censorship did any more injury in the Victorian theatre than the introduction of a religious censorship did to the theatre of Shakespeare. It was an (infringement of liberty, but only a minor infringement. As regards fiction, there was no censorship; but if a novel was thought obscene, the writer could be prosecuted in court. This, too, however, was objected to by many people as an outrage on freedom of speech. Still, most countries draw the line somewhere in their ideas of what it is permissible to print; and Flaubert was prosecuted in France, as Zola’s translator was in England. Every country will ultimately do its utmost to stop what it believes to be the spread of corruption. Its notion of what is corrupt may be ludicrous; but it would rather part with a little of its freedom of speech than tolerate what it looks on as corrupt influences.

The most interesting disputes about freedom of speech in our own time, however, are not concerned with obscenity, but with politics. The question, “ Is there freedom of speech in Russia ? ” is often raised by critics of Communism, and the Communists reply to this with the question, “ Is there freedom of speech in England?” What, for example, about the freedom of the press ? Can it be' said that the Russian press is free if no one opposed to the Government is permitted to start an opposition newspaper ?

The Communists’ reply to this is that there is no opposition in Russia, and that, as nobody wants to start an opposition newspaper, the question

does not arise. Apart from this, they say a great deal of criticism does appear in the Russian press, and is even encouraged. At the same time, the fact remains that it would not be possible to advocate the return to capitalism in a Russian paper as it is possible to advocate the destruction of capitalism in an English paper. If that point does not seem worth making, it is at least fair to ask whether the Trotskyites who remained in Russia after Trotsky’s departure were allowed to continue a press of their own. The answer to this question would probably be that the Trotskyites aimed at upsetting an established government by force, and that no established government will grant its enemies freedom to do so. Quite a fair answer, too. The ordinary Communist, however, will, unless I am mistaken, argue from his point of view that not only is the Russian press free, but that it is freer than the press in England. Look at the English press, he says. It is almost all in the hands of rich press lords for whose newspapers journalists are compelled to write, not what they themselves believe, but what their employers want. The English journalist, we are told, is a slave, and to pretend that he enjoys freedom of speech is laughable. In theory, I admit, the control of the press by a few rich men or companies is dangerous; but the important question is not whether it is dangerous in theory, but whether it is dangerous in practice. How does it work ? In what sense is the freedom of speech of the ordinary journalist limited ?

Obviously he would not be allowed to advocate a Communist policy for England if he were writing leaders for the Times or a Protectionist policy if he were writing leaders for the News Chronicle, any more than he would be allowed to write pro-Capi-talist articles in the Daily Wjorker. After all, religious freedom does not mean a condition of things in which a Mormon would be allowed to preach in W|estminster Abbey or a Unitarian in a Baptist chapel. Yet religious freedom, most people would agree, exists in England. Freedom of the press does not mean that any journalist should have the liberty to write anything he pleases in any paper. It merely means that he should be at liberty to write anything he pleases and to get it published in any paper that is willing to accept it. He has the right, even, if he can raise the money, to start a paper of his own. The English press, however, is so various that any journalist, except a man of very peculiar views or a rather dull writer, should- be able to find a platform somewhere in it.

What healthier symptom of the freedom of the Engilsh press could there be than the publication of Low’s cartoons in the Evening Standard ? What led me to write in the subject was an able article by Mr George Orwell entitled “ The Prevention of Literature ” in the second number of Polemic. Here Mr Orwell vehemently denounce the Russian idea of freedom and the “ Russophile intelligentsia ”in England. I do not know what evidence he possesses for the statement that writers in Russia “ are viciously persecuted.” He is rather inclined to extreme statements. He paints a deplorable picture of the conditions of the writer in the present age in all countries: He tells us:

“ Any writer ;or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. 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 hack-work. The encroachment of official bodies like the M. 0.1. and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive, but also waste his time and fictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphe -3 of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. 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 to him from above, and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.” The position that Mr Orwell has deservedly won for himself suggests to be that he has .over-stated his case considerably. It is good to be vigilant in defnee of liberty, but it is also good to be .-cofiscj/ms of thb amount of liberty we at present possess and not to make light of it till a better kind of liberty can be devised.

Is freedom of speech in danger in England at present ? I doubt it, and I do not think it will be, so long as the tolerant give-and-take English temper survives. The most serious menace to it, I agree with Mr Odwell, would be the spread of a belief in dictatorship, whether of the misnamed proletariat or of anybody else.