"Everybody knows" that the '50s were a time of peace and prosperity and progress, a rather idyllic time in retrospect, when advances were being made every day in science, exploration, medicine, and the technologies that make everyday life both safer and more convenient — and which had so far advanced over earlier decades that such social injustices and disruptions as were perceptible might seem to be either minimal or fading relics of bygone and barbaric ages. Most people will also agree that the '50s were a time of complacency, of conformity, of a stultifying homogenization and a lack of spiritual creativity, at least in the mainstream, and of a self-congratulatory, blinkered obliviousness to the deeper problems confronting both society and human nature. 

What is less agreed upon is whether or not this state of affairs were a good thing. It is not uncommon to hear people harking back to the '50s with nostalgia, as though the sense of security and permanence and comfort in middle-class majority society were not an illusion, something as innately temporary as a ski-hut half-way up a mountain down which an avalanche is falling, so limited and superficial in its visible benefits as to be no more than butter on a rock. Particularly now, when the first-hand testimony is largely ignored of those days, and memory is gone or faded into a roseate haze; it is not in fact uncommon to find the flaws of the past being lamented but with ambivalence, as though, were it only possible to have maintained that status quo, the real and admitted troubles of censorship, government and corporate oppression, civil rights violations, pollution, patronage, and impending or simmering warfare across the globe would not have been so bad, really, by comparison to the present disorder. Liberty, it seems, is something which sounds very nice — but isn't all that much fun, when it comes down to it.

Rarely these days will you find, unless you dig back to the words written and spoken in those times, a true, unsparing indictment of the era viewed now with such fond and selective reminiscence. Still more rare is it to find a then-contemporary discussion of the problems which attempts to be evenhanded, not to lunge from radical extreme to radical extreme, laying all blame on the opposing party, on someone else, some outside force or internal dissidence, The Government or Youth or Socialists or Industry, and proposing solutions as oversimplified as impractical to implement, in the name of idealism and principle. This is as true of any decade of the past as it is of the present: dispassion, after all, is difficult to find in those who have something significant to gain or lose in any outcome.

For this reason, it is as vital as it is refreshing to read On Liberty by John Stewart Mill, a little book which does not deal with, as he makes clear in the opening paragraph, the confusion in popular philosophy over Free Will versus Determinism, but which deals with the proper exercise of human freedom in a just society, and what limitations may — and more importantly, may not — be rightly applied by a democratic government, and still more importantly, why.

No, I'm not (merely) being arch and outrageous by referring to a text written in 1858 and published the following year: there is minimal difference, when you look below the surface, between the social situations and issues described and addressed by Mill, in Victorian England, as there is in those of still-living but increasingly remote memory. Moreover, the mellow, sentimental haze through which the 1950s are viewed is very little different from that in which the 19th century is popularly regarded: a time of flaws and quaint foibles, and of repression, true — but also a time of cozy safety and spiritual comfort — and moral virtue — and who can say the latter is not worth the former?

—John Stewart Mill, for one, that practical ideallist who in a grand classical spirit, never divorced ethical principles from their real-life applications, nor made the fatal mistakes of whitewashing over counter-arguments and difficult questions, nor of writing off humanity in utter cynicism of the sort that can lead equally to arrogant isolation or to bloody utopianism. What Dickens paints, with righteous indignation, Mill analyzes; one who, unlike (for example) Thomas Jefferson, actually strove to live the principles of egalitarianism and intellectual fairness which he preached in his own personal life, he is a thinker who transcends ideology and for this reason (beyond the distancing of a century's linguistic drift) is somewhat difficult to read, and not particularly comfortable, or comforting. Where you agree with him, you are forced to confront why; and where you disagree with him, even more so. (One bio in a philosophical encyclopedia I found actually dismissed him for being too evenhanded, too willing to do justice to his opponents' arguments, and not polemical enough!) 

Nor is Mill a naive idealist, who believes that democracy or any other institution will by itself create a perfect society, any more than establishment of religion could (or ever did), or who does not recognize and address the problems of the abuses of freedom, and the practicality that must be in force for a real, functioning human community to exist, "warts and all."  Any attempts to caricature him thus simply discredit his reviewers. Unfortunately perhaps he does not descend to sloganeering, to quick fixes, or to cooking his data to make his arguments clearer, which makes it difficult to paraphrase him without doing his words injustice; his nuanced treatments of real and possible situations, drawing on factual evidence, personal experience as well as theory are much more in the line of philosophers like Aquinas and his hero, Socrates, than they are of today's pundits (so-called) and demagogues.*  (This can be clearly seen in the pull quotes at the open and close of this article: while witty and incisive, they are hardly "sound bites"!)

Nor does he set anything off limits from consideration, taking statements to their logical, if unwelcome conclusions, any more than he accords any human legislation the untouchable status of some sort of Holy Writ. The political sphere which Mill envisions, is not one in which no government interference exists, in a kind of libertarian utopian dream — and where people would be free as in Chesterton's memorable imagery, to let their kids run around naked or burn thousands of onions in the street. Public good, and private integrity, according to Mill must be constantly balanced — and this requires a perpetual application of what, in former days, would have been known as the cardinal virtues of prudence and discretion as well as justice and mercy to every situation. It is, therefore, a dynamic, organic entity, this thing called civilization, and requires constant mental activity and engagement from every person of good will and integrity.

The danger, Mill argues (as would Ray Bradbury in his scathing 1950 critique, Fahrenheit 451) to a free society lies not in attack from without, but from a failure of self-criticism and consequent growth; only stagnant societies, intent at avoiding any disruption, and willing to go to any extremes of repression to ensure this, are at real danger from outside forces. This is not a small danger. He is very well aware of the fact that this repressive tendency comes not from the "top-down" of a small oligarchy, but from the "ground-up," grass roots willingness of human beings to punish those who are different, forcing them as CS Lewis puts it in the Screwtape Letters, to "be like stalks." He comments, in fact, on the irony of how between the time of his writing that England had advanced beyond the use of the extant retrograde laws permitting government censorship of the press, and the publication of On Liberty, there was in fact a draconian employment of them — Mill has no illusions of time alone causing human progress. 

But he is, however, a very hopeful writer, and one we need very much today. Considering that he addresses the issues of censorship, free speech, social conformity, the possibility of replacing human workers with robots, the problem that schools tend to churn out little regurgitators, the limits of government authority, the duties of government to interfere in what circumstances, the likelihood of a Prohibition movement taking hold (this seventy years before it actually happened) and the immorality (!) of such a legislation, the pros and cons of regulating lethally-dangerous items, the illegitimacy of attempting to legislate religion,** the problem of society's inherent tendency to uphold the status quo, the fact that power of whatever type tends both to abuse, and to self-perpetuating, self-serving laws, the value of dissent and of challenge to popular opinion as a counteractant to mental stagnation, and the absolute need of a free, civilized society to constantly question itself, and for every member, male or female to attempt to live the recollected life of the true follower of Socrates in so far as individual ability allows — lest we sink into a turgid, uncreative, uncorrecting apathy which endorses evils so long as they are commonly approved — Mill is an author whose time has not come, but rather has never ended.

…a State, which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile 
instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with 
small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the 
perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in 
the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that 
the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.

—Thus, in recognition and honor of the holiday, I gladly present "On Liberty" for your consideration.

3.July.2003