Moblog

Moncure Conway, in whose honour we are assembled to-day, devoted his life to two great objects: freedom of thought and freedom of the individual. In regard to both these objects, something has been gained since his time, but something also has been lost. New dangers, somewhat different in form from those of past ages, threaten both kinds of freedom, and unless a vigorous and vigilant public opinion can be aroused in defence of them, there will be much less of both a hundred years hence than there is now. My purpose in this address is to emphasize the new dangers and to consider how they can be met.

Let us begin by trying to be clear as to what we mean by "free thought." This expression has two senses. In its narrower sense it means thought which does not accept the dogmas of traditional religion. In this sense a man is a "free thinker" if he is not a Christian or a Mussulman or a Buddhist or a Shintoist or a member of any of the other bodies of men who accept some inherited orthodoxy. In Christian countries a man is called a " free thinker " if he does not decidedly believe in God, though this would not suffice to make a man a "free thinker" in a Buddhist country.

I do not wish to minimize the importance of free thought in this sense. (...) But there is also a wider sense of "free thought," which I regard as of still greater importance. Indeed, the harm done by traditional religions seems chiefly traceable to the fact that they have prevented free thought in this wider sense. The wider sense is not so easy to define as the narrower, and it will be well to spend some little time in trying to arrive at its essence.

When we speak of anything as "free," our meaning is not definite unless we can say what it is free from. Whatever or whoever is "free" is not subject to some external compulsion, and to be precise we ought to say what this kind of compulsion is. Thus thought is "free" when it is free from certain kinds of outward control which are often present. Some of these kinds of control which must be absent if thought is to be "free" are obvious, but others are more subtle and elusive.

To begin with the most obvious. Thought is not "free" when legal penalties are incurred by the holding or not holding of certain opinions, or by giving expression to one's belief or lack of belief on certain matters. Very few countries in the world have as yet even this elementary kind of freedom. In England, under the Blasphemy Laws, it is illegal to express disbelief in the Christian religion, though in practice the law is not set in motion against the well-to-do. It is also illegal to teach what Christ taught on the subject of non-resistance. Therefore, whoever wishes to avoid becoming a criminal must profess to agree with Christ's teaching, but must avoid saying what that teaching was. In America no one can enter the country without first solemnly declaring that he disbelieves in anarchism and polygamy ; and, once inside, he must also disbelieve in communism. In Japan it is illegal to express disbelief in the divinity of the Mikado. It will thus be seen that a voyage round the world is a perilous adventure. A Mohammedan, a Tolstoyan, a Bolshevik, or a Christian cannot undertake it without at some point becoming a criminal, or holding his tongue about what he considers important truths. This, of course, applies only to steerage passengers ; saloon passengers are allowed to believe whatever they please, provided they avoid offensive obtrusiveness.

It is clear that the most elementary condition, if thought is to be free, is the absence of legal penalties for the expression of opinions. No great country has yet reached to this level, although most of them think they have. The opinions which are still persecuted strike the majority as so monstrous and immoral that the general principle of toleration cannot be held to apply to them.

Legal penalties are, however, in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thought. The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a con- troversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search. Both these obstacles exist in every large country known to me, except China, which is the last refuge of freedom. It is these obstacles with which I shall be concerned - their present magnitude, the likelihood of their increase, and the possibility of their diminution.

The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticizing, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large. They find themselves born into a certain place in society, and they accept what each day brings forth, without any effort of thought beyond what the immediate present requires. Almost as instinctively as the beasts of the field, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought, and without considering that by sufficient effort the whole conditions of their lives could be changed. A certain percentage, guided by personal ambition, make the effort of thought and will which is necessary to place themselves among the more fortunate members of the community ; but very few among these are seriously concerned to secure for all the advantages which they seek for themselves. It is only a few rare and exceptional men who have that kind of love towards mankind at large that makes them unable to endure patiently the general mass of evil and suffering, regardless of any relation it may have to their own lives. These few, driven by sympathetic pain, will seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape, some new system of society by which life may become richer, more full of joy and less full of preventable evils than it is at present. But in the past such men have, as a rule, failed to interest the very victims of the injustices which they wished to remedy. The more unfortunate sections of the population have been ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and weariness, timorous through the imminent danger of immediate punishment by the holders of power, and morally unreliable owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To create among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort after general ameliora- tion might have seemed a hopeless task, and indeed in the past it has generally proved so. But the modern world, by the increase of education and the rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners, has produced new conditions, more favourable than ever before to the demand for radical reconstruction.

[...] Der Informatikunterricht wird jedoch an den Folgen der auf oberflächliche Handhabungsfertigkeiten ausgerichteten Ausbildung noch viele Jahre zu leiden haben. Nicht allein deshalb, weil es schwierig ist, in kurzer Zeit und ohne entsprechend ausgebildete Lehrpersonen den Übergang von einem schlecht eingeführten Unterricht zu einem qualitativ hoch stehenden Unterricht zu vollziehen, sondern auch deshalb, weil die Informatik in der allgemeinen Öffentlichkeit ein falsches Bild bekommen hat. Informatiker sind nach landläufiger Meinung diejenigen, die "gut mit Computern umgehen" können, d.h. diejenigen, die möglichst viele Tricks kennen, mit welchen den von allerlei Unzulänglichkeiten ihrer Werkzeuge geplagten Computeranwendern geholfen werden kann. Wir sollten dieses Zerrbild unbedingt mit dem Inhalt klassischer Fächer wie Mathematik, Physik und Chemie vergleichen, denen wohl kaum jemand die grundsätzliche Substanz absprechen wird, auch wenn die Relevanz einzelner Themen durchaus diskutiert werden kann.

"Every word you know has been taught to you one way or another. And thus, every concept and belief you have is a result of this same influence. (...) Consequently, the cultural attributes we maintain as important values, are most often the ones that are reinforced by the external culture. The most dominant cultural attributes maintained are the ones that are reinforced by your environment. If you are born into a society which rewards competition over collaboration, then you most likely will adopt to those values in order to survive."

"Can we see in any media or even university press a paragraph of clear unmasking of a global regime that condemns a third of all children to malnutrition with more food than enough available...? In such a social order, thought becomes indistinguishable from propaganda." (John McMurty, The Cancer State of Capitalism)

"For, as this presentation will explore, the majority of people on this planet not only have no idea how they are being affected negatively by the market economy at large, they actually on average hold a steadfast commitment to its principles based on nothing more than the traditional indoctrination. I got an email once that said to me, "If you're against the free market, you're against freedom". And naturally I shuddered at the state of mind control that the dominant established orthodoxy has successfully imposed. Of course, this is how power is maintained. The trick again is to condition people so thoroughly into the established value systems that any thought of an alternative is inherently rules out without critical examination. And to show how deeply pervasive this phenomenon is, you will notice that virtually all the activist organizations, and the environmental, social and political movements of the day always exclude the market system itself as a determinant of harmful effects. It doesn't even occur to them. Instead, they focus on individuals and certain groups or corrupt corporations, and while, you know, it is needed in a per-case basis to target problematic areas it avoids the mechanism which is essentially creating the problem. This is the fatal flaw of what's happening in the so called activist community today. And, as will be firmly and clearly established over the course of this presentation, the greatest destroyer of ecology, the greatest source of waste and pollution, the greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, inhumanity, poverty and social distortion, the greatest generator of social and personal neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety, and the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for global sustainability and hence progress on this planet is not some government, not some legislation, it's not some rogue corporation or monopoly or cartel, it's not some flaw of human nature, it is in fact the economic system itself, at it's very foundation."