Squandering the currency of rationalism

http://www.georgejonas.ca/recent_writing.cfm?id=979

by George Jonas
National Post
May 18, 2011

The Good Book advises that "the truth shall make you free" (John 8: 32), 
but these days it's just as likely that the truth, as you perceive it, 
shall make you its slave. It may put you among the Truthers, which is also 
the title of a new book by my friend and colleague, Jonathan Kay. Among 
The Truthers offers the most accurate and insightful description of true 
believers since -- well, since Eric Hoffer's 1951 classic The True 
Believer. The two books aren't alike -- Hoffer intuits his subject, and 
Kay researches it -- but although Kay meticulously climbs his mountain, 
while Hoffer is deposited on his by helicopter without his feet touching 
the ground, once they're at the peak, the panorama is similar.

No one is as reasonable as a person seeking the truth, and no one is as 
unreasonable as one who thinks he has found it. "Absolute faith corrupts 
as absolutely as absolute power," as Eric Hoffer has it, which is accurate 
as well as witty, yet the fundamental problem with believing that the moon 
is made of green cheese isn't that it's a faith absolutely held but that 
it happens not to be true. A person who believes in dairy products being 
the building blocks of the universe isn't a crank because he believes it 
absolutely but because he believes it at all.

9/11 Truthers believe the destruction of the World Trade Center is the 
result of a plot by Bush administration insiders looking for an excuse to 
invade the oilfields of the Middle East. This is in the same league as 
viewing green cheese as the chief ingredient of the lunar landscape, only 
more pernicious. The problem being error in both cases, in the Age of 
Reason the solution would have appeared to be instruction. The champions 
of enlightenment would have said: Well, the tool with which to separate 
truth from falsehood is freedom -- specifically, freedom of speech. Let 
Truth grapple with Falsehood and Truth will win.

The poet John Milton's Areopagitica, one of the most eloquent arguments 
for free expression ever made, pretty much launched the concept on its 
dazzling career. In the English-speaking world, free speech went from zero 
to 100% in about six generations. That was the elapsed time between Milton 
asking England's Parliament to permit unlicensed printing in 1644, and the 
United States Congress passing 10 amendments to the Constitution, known as 
the "Bill of Rights," in 1791. Free speech, not much of a factor even in 
relatively enlightened kingdoms before the 17th century, was all but writ 
in stone by the end of the 18th.

In today's parlance, free speech went viral. By the end of the 19th 
century, all Western-style liberal democracies took free speech for 
granted, even those that didn't always practise it. Minimally, it was an 
ideal, part of the written or unwritten constitution of what became known 
as "the free world" in the 20th century. Only the Nazis and the Communists 
denied it. Actually, the Communists only denied it in practice but they 
kept it on the books.

Milton was pretty confident about the power of Truth. Explaining to 
lawmakers why they should permit unlicensed printing, he said: "Let her 
[Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a 
free and open encounter?"

If we didn't know that there was no Internet in Milton's day, this 
sentence alone would tell us. By the time of Eric Hoffer, even before the 
Internet, we've modified our view of Truth and Falsehood grappling. "We 
lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves," Hoffer wrote. Kay is even less 
sanguine about the outcome: "Any effort to engage committed conspiracy 
theorists in reasoned debate is a waste of time," he writes.

Is the Internet bringing about the end of free speech, contrary to all 
initial expectations? I certainly hope not. I'm suggesting, though, that 
the Net is forcing us to confront a question that we never raised until 
the 17th century, and then pretty much settled by the 18th, namely that 
Free Speech Is A Good Thing, kill-and-die good, go-to-war-for good.

One still believes it, except one isn't quite so sure that one would kill 
or die for conspiracy theorists going viral on the Internet.

Free speech was a product of the age of reason. It was the currency of 
rationalism, the coin of the mind's realm. Having more of it meant being 
richer. Speech had value as people were becoming fascinated with their own 
minds and started recognizing its power and its potential benefits. They 
wanted to talk and listen to each other.

Now all they want is to hear the echo of their own voices. In our 
post-rational age, free speech appears to be the problem, not the 
solution. The proudest achievements and inventions of the Age of Reason, 
from liberal education to the Internet, have become sewers, backing up, 
spreading ignorance, misinformation, and electronically multiplied error 
in viral waves of contamination. Truth grapples with Falsehood daily -- 
and ends up flat on her back. Milton, there's been a glitch.

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