Post #28: Self-Censorship

24 May 2023

In another time and place—better maybe, or maybe not, but certainly different from ours—there might have appeared in this spot a post that I have been thinking about these past few days, in which I approach the question of grievances and how best to handle them through the lens of the opening verses of the Dhammapada, with some Stoic, Socratic, and Christian strands woven in. While I did not set out to say anything very radical or remarkable, at least in the context of these well-established traditions, and while I felt myself in the company of the best of guides, my reflections still came out so emphatically counter-cultural in light of what I judge the general climate of opinion to be in 2023, that I dare not put the result online.

Character-smearing is nothing new under the sun, and other ages have let the dogs off the leash with far greater ruthlessness and ferocity; but the relative mildness of our millennial manners is deceptive, and the ease with which reputational wildfires can now be set off and vilifications spread at the speed of light to all corners of the earth with little hope of fairness or mercy, or redress after the fact, is a prospect so daunting that it might make stronger men than me tremble and waver over the send and publish button.

This puts me in a most awkward position as a firm adherent, all my life, to the principle of free speech, rigorously applied. I really do believe with all my heart that the turn towards measuring the merit of a body of opinion by the likelihood that it might give offense to someone is pernicious in the extreme, because it subordinates the interest we all have in a vigorous contest for the truth to the sensitivities of a few, even while it encourages the latter to cultivate ever thinner skins as if it were a great virtue to nurture grievances, and not a much greater one to rise above them in a spirit of equanimity, forbearance, and loving-kindness.

If there is one thing on which I consider myself something of a lifelong expert, it is being excessively thin-skinned, premature birth and all; and I must insist with all the accumulated weight of too many decades of experience with this problem that it is not an admirable distinction that should be encouraged and rewarded and forever reinforced, but a serious weakness that one needs to work on with diligence all one’s life if one does not want to break or go mad and spread much misery by one’s constant over-reactions. Meditation looks so very vital to me for this reason perhaps above all others, and if I ever know whereof I speak, it is here.

From actively cowing others into silence, we go to the second stage, where the costs of speaking out, all the potential penalties formal as well as informal, are anticipated by the prospective speakers themselves and soon become the predominant consideration, so that the habit of boldly and bravely speaking the truth before the cold winds of disapprobation gives way more and more to rampant self-censorship and the scurrying for safety and shelter behind the walls of pretended conformity and hypocrisy. It saddens me that I should ever find it necessary even to consider such an unvalorous sidestep, let alone that I should settle on it, both because of what it says about the narrow limits of my courage and because of what it implies for what can (or rather cannot) be said and heard anymore without blushing or blanching before the polite and duly educated classes in our day.

What I would have shared, though perhaps misconceived, might have benefited others in various ways: if true, though bitter, it would have been important to hear, however unwelcome; if erroneous, some small corner of the truth might still have been helpfully illuminated, even if the argument at large was mistaken; and even if altogether pernicious and largely useless, it might have helped others see the truth more clearly by way of contrast; or that too failing, it might at least have allowed their faculties to be exercised and sharpened in opposition to patent error. All this will now be lost forever because I will shut the file up on my hard drive and perhaps never show it to anyone else again—truly a depressing perspective from where I am sitting. (The argument that I might have toned the text down to make it less provocative does not convince me; it would have falsified what I had to say, and I do not wish to put before anyone something that does not truly reflect what I sincerely believe.)

One cannot only be guided by lofty principles in life, however; one must also be realistic about one’s circumstances, whatever they may be; and the sobering reality, in this case, is that we are not, to say the least, all adherents of the creed that J.S. Mill laid out so impressively in his classic On Liberty. To claim the right to speak one’s mind frankly and forthrightly even on the most sensitive issues—and the cultivation of grievances seems to be one of the most sensitive and central of all these days—is to invite such reputational ravages in 2023, and such corresponding dangers to one’s very livelihood, as an academic especially, that I am not willing to run the risk. Whether that is more of an indictment of my lack of guts, or of a lack of sense in our age, I cannot say and leave for the reader to decide, inasmuch as he or she feels competent to make a judgment.

For my part, I must content myself on this occasion with deferring to spirits immeasurably greater and bolder, and referring the reader to the opening lines of the Dhammapada, with the world of implications they carry; to Epictetus and a stalwart latter-day disciple of his who put Stoicism to the test in the laboratory of a torture cell; and to Mill’s famous chapter. The conclusions we would draw from these readings may differ, and fruitful exchanges about them should still be possible in trusted private circles, but I have lost faith, sad to say, in our age’s ability to sustain them without rancor and recrimination in public and at large. That may be merely my failing or it may reflect something bigger, but there it is.

Readings: Dhammapada 1.1–5; Epictetus’s Enchiridion and James Stockdale's Courage under Fire (Stanford 1993), an account of how Epictetus helped him endure years of torture and solitary confinement during the Vietnam War; J.S. Mill, On Liberty, chapter 2: Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion