Freedom of Thought
Choice - England - From Chaucer to Mill - Christianity 2.0
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Choice
As I noted on the previous page, I see religious tolerance in light of comparative religion and positive-sum thinking. Both of these are like agnosticism in that they encourage the exploration of religions, rather than the attempt to prove that one religion is the best.
On this page I’ll argue that the ability to think freely is closely connected to, and at times dependent on ✰ the freedom to choose between one religion and another, ✰ the freedom to choose between belief, disbelief, or doubt, and ✰ the existence of openly available options. My notion is that liberal democracy isn’t perfect, yet it does allow for these types of freedom. While I think that it’s impossible to say that one religion is better than another, since none of them are subject to proof of any kind, I think it is possible to say that an open, free, and equal society is the most likely to allow its citizens the freedom to openly explore all points of view.
Not that liberal democracy is anywhere near perfect. Churchill seems to have got it right it when he said, it “has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried.” It’s worth noting that he said this in 1947, two years after his party was voted out of power, and the same year that Britain finally withdrew from India.
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England
It might be argued in the case of England that liberal thinking defeated the country’s worst abuses. The British were elbow-deep in the bloody trans-Atlantic slave trade, yet by the end of the 18th century England was, like the northern United States, at the forefront of the abolition movement. While England had an elite and undemocratic system of parliamentary democracy in 1800, by 1928 every adult was able to vote. Even at its most colonial and elitist, England had a tradition of free speech and enquiry, and it may be that it was this tradition that wore away and finally broke the chains of a once elitist and racist society. We see this possibility in the life of Voltaire, who was amazed at the freedom of thought allowed his fellow philosophers — like his favourite John Locke — yet denied his fellow Frenchmen.
In England the tradition of free thought is a powerful one, and finds an elegant late expression in John Stewart Mill’s 1859 tract On Liberty. Mill argues that there are two types of oppression: the first operates on an openly blunt and coercive level through “the public authorities.” The second operates on a more subtle and personal level, on which “society is itself the tyrant.” We can see the first type in some places of the Muslim world, where believers aren’t free to consider options or to confess other versions of religion (just as in Russia and North Korea voters aren’t free to consider options or to confess other versions of politics). It’s even possible in some places to be tried and convicted for changing or rejecting religion. The sin of apostasy seems odd today, and brings back memories of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, witch hunts, Galileo’s forced recantation, etc.
In general Western Christianity no longer has Mill’s first and highly coercive “public” type of coercive intolerance, where one runs the risk of being accused of such things as apostasy. Yet Christianity does have many instances of the second type, which Mill describes as a subtle and pervasive way of making people think along certain lines, and not allowing them the space to think differently. Publicly and politically people are free to think what they want, but inwardly society, family, and friends pressure them to think in a certain manner. Here’s a key passage from Mill’s On Liberty:
Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.
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From Chaucer to Mill
In discussing the relation between politics and agnosticism, I recognize that my view is a Western one, derived largely from the type of free-speech arguments we find in Chaucer’s preface to “The Miller’s Tale” (c. 1380-90), Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859).
Chaucer argues that if you don’t like what someone writes (and by extension, what someone says), you’re free to turn the page (or turn up your headphones, try a seat further away, etc.) because everyone “must” be allowed to have their say. His argument is crucial to the democratic ethic of literature that I champion throughout Gospel & Universe: Chaucer’s host argues that to silence any point of view — even if it’s that of a boorish drunk — is to be false to his material, that is, to the very people he’s writing about, and to the inclusive “design” of his story, which is to represent all of society. Given the importance of nobility, class, and religious ethics in the late thirteen hundreds, it’s significant that Chaucer lets the drunken miller tell his ribald tale right after the knight’s “noble” tale, bumping the monk in the process. The brilliance of Chaucer here is that he fits into the tavern stories of his Canterbury Tales one of the great English arguments against censorship:
For Goddes love, demeth nat that I seye
For God's love, think not that I speak
Of yvel entente, but for I moot reherce
Out of evil intention, but because I must repeat
Hir tales alle, be they bettre or werse,
All their tales, be they better or worse,
Or elles falsen som of my mateere.
Or else (I must) falsify some of my material.
And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere,
And therefore, whoever does not want to hear it,
Turne over the leef and chese another tale;
Turn over the leaf and choose another tale;
For he shal fynde ynowe, grete and smale,
For he shall find enough, of every sort,
Of storial thyng that toucheth gentillesse,
Of historical matter that concerns nobility,
And eek moralitee and hoolynesse.
And also morality and holiness.
Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys.
Blame not me if you choose amiss.
The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this.
The Miller is a churl; you know this well.
So was the Reve eek and othere mo,
So was the Reeve also and many others,
And harlotrie they tolden bothe two.
And ribaldry they told, both of the two.
Avyseth yow, and put me out of blame;
Think about this, and don't blame me;
And eek men shal nat maken ernest of game.
And also people should not take a joke too seriously.
— from Harvard’s Chaucer website
(I changed the italics, bold, & indents)
(I look further into Chaucer’s preface and tale in Don’t Forget the Miller in 🔬 Science & Mystery, and also in The Miller in 🧜🏽♀️ The Mermaid: Existential & Then Some.)
About 250 years after Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Milton takes a more religious angle on censorship, arguing that in order to choose what’s good, we must expose ourselves to all manner of ideas, including what’s sinful. In this sense, censorship goes against freedom of enquiry, thought, choice and religion. Milton’s combination of religion and individualism isn’t surprising, given that he wrote in a century when Protestants like him dissented from mainstream Anglicanism, and when parliamentarians like him finally gained supremacy over monarchists (after the 1642-51 Civil War).
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. …That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure … Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read. . . .
Later in the same century, Locke argues that laws and government don’t come pre-packaged from God, and that ”the divine right of kings” is opportunistic nonsense. Instead, we must develop a secular civil society that operates according to debate and consensus:
The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth; nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what that legislative shall enact, according to the trust put in it.
Freedom of men under government is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man: as freedom of nature is, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.
(I look more closely at Locke in Locke’s Double Key and Locked into this World — both in 🔬 Three Little Words. I also use Locke’s theory of sense impressions throughout my chapter ⛱ Señor Locke, starting with The Gringo Takes Stock.)
170 years later, Mill follows in Locke’s footsteps by asserting 1. that we should be free to follow our own natures, and 2. that restraint should only come from laws that are transparent, rational, constitutional, and universally-applied. Writing in a century where such a legal democratic framework was already developed, and also in the process of being expanded (in the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884), Mill adds that we should also desist from coercing each other in matters that don’t harm us. A good example of this is when Canada’s Prime Minister Paul Martin refused in 2005 to debate personal attitudes on gay marriage, arguing instead that it’s a freedom that doesn’t harm anyone.
Mill’s arguments are particularly applicable to skepticism and agnosticism, in that both of these philosophies aim to understand opposing views. They don’t just aim to understand opposing views in the way that we usually understand things, but also in the way that those who believe them understand them.
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them... he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.
As I note in Not Quite Skeptical 1 (in 🏛 Skeptics & Stoics), skeptics of the ephectic Pyrrhonist variety explore opposite views so that they can find a state of equilibrium between opposing positions. Agnostics at times do that, yet more often they entertain opposing views so that they can understand and even experience them — perhaps to create a balanced position, perhaps to reaffirm their original point of view, or perhaps to switch their point of view entirely.
(I explore the way others explore opposing views in Montaigne’s Balance, Pyrrho’s Equilibrium & Zhuangzi’s Pivot, Hegel’s Dialectic, & Keats’ Negative Capability, all in 🔬 Three Little Words.)
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Christianity 2.0
I believe that what liberal thinking did to English politics and society, it can do to religion. If Christianity were to strip the words chosen, elect, and only from its vocabulary, it would be like stripping exclusionary voting rules from elections. It would be like scrapping the law whereby only men of demonstrable means could vote, which was the case in England until the Reform Act of 1832.
How long do we need to keep using the definite article the — as in “I am the way, the truth, and the light”? This definite article excludes every Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, atheist, and free thinker on the face of Earth. And how long will we hang onto one phrase, written by John, who ascribes the most exclusive phrase of all — No one comes to the Father but by me — to the man who welcomed prostitutes and outcasts into the Kingdom of Heaven? The circular argument, Yes, but the prostitute must accept Jesus to enter the Kingdom misses the point. Isn’t Grace open to all? Aren’t exclusionary laws — and the language of these laws — just as outdated as kingdoms and the divine right of kings?
And how long do Catholics need to keep a gender hierarchy in which half of its own believers can’t be priest or Pope?
And how long will Christians repeat the absurd Jewish exclusivity of the Chosen People in phrases like the Elect or the Saved?
Again, getting rid of the definite article the would be a good start.
Getting rid of such hierarchies, and getting rid of the burden of having to believe in — and argue for — an exclusionary superiority, would allow Christianity to become truly democratic and universal. Some might object that you can’t change tradition or scripture, yet as the lineage from Babylon to Jerusalem to Rome to Wittenberg shows, no scripture, and no system relating to scripture, is absolute. Religion has always changed over time.
I suggest that instead of hanging onto old dogma, Christianity does what Buddhism did with the Hindu caste system, what Judaism struggles to do with the albatross of the Chosen People around its neck, and what Islam struggles to do with a 1300 year-old literalism in the secular world. This is the larger critical argument that I make in regard to Christianity throughout Part 2: Currents of Religion.
I should also note, however, that this is my critical argument; just as often I make positive arguments about religion. Indeed, I see critique as an attempt to remove the obstacles of exclusivity and dogma, which block us from the joys of religious free-thinking, creativity, and expansiveness. In this, I’m trying to do what Peter Enns does with a believer’s view of the Bible, and what Jean Bottéro does with our understanding of Biblical and Near Eastern history. I flesh out this deeper argument in ♒️ The Currents of Sumer — see especially the Introduction & Overview to that chapter.
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