I cannot believe that the powers that be intend to persist in their policy of drastically reducing a share of publicly owned advertisements to Stabroek News – as the Editor-in-Chief states and the statistics show is happening. This would be an attack on freedom of expression and an attempt to suppress the independent press and therefore unacceptable in a democracy.
If this were indeed happening it would be the unhappiest of events. We all know why. It is because no question needs so urgently and repeatedly to be asked of anyone with power over others than that suggested by Oliver Cromwell in a letter he addressed to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on the 3rd August, 1650. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ,” Cromwell urged the assembled Churchmen, “think it possible you may be mistaken.” Great words that Cromwell later, in the fullness of his own power, too often failed to remember.
“Think it possible you may be mistaken.” It is a point that continually has to be made to anyone who gets to thinking that he and he alone possesses the keys to the kingdom of truth. Throughout history cruelty, evil, and inhuman absurdities of all kinds have followed in the wake of dogma put into practice. Long ago the most dangerous kind of dogma was religious, because religious leaders wielded dominant power over people. Now, in an era when politicians have the power, it is political dogma which is most dangerous.
“Think it possible you may be mistaken.” Politicians who cannot readily admit that they may be in error, that they need all the constructive criticism and suggestions they can get, that any system they espouse is bound to be flawed as time passes and is therefore subject to change and improvement – such politicians are bound to menace the general good sooner or later. It would be all right if they said what Sam Johnson used to say: “I dogmatise and am contradicted, and in the conflict of opinions and sentiments I find delight.” But the trouble is that a politician’s dogmatism tends eventually and always to end up in the claim which Juvenal, the Roman poet, more than 1900 years ago described when he had his emperor shout: “I will it, I insist on it! Let my will stand instead of reason.” And along that way – the way of one man’s or one party’s will in place of the reasoning of many – lies great danger.
We should strictly avoid letting partisan party, or any one person’s, opinion dominate any sphere of our national life. John Stuart Mill is one of the great authorities on this subject. It would be good to make him required reading as an antidote to so much that is turgid, blinkered, rigidly ideological, partisan or coldly dogmatic in the life of any nation. Listen to him on the subject of letting conflicting views contend:
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is
robbing the human race: posterity as well as the existing generation;
those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.
If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of
exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great
a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth,
produced by its collision with error.”
That is well said. I have no doubt that dogmatism must be challenged and challenged again wherever it appears in public life – in the press, in the Churches, in the marketplace, in the arts, in academia, and not least in Government circles and in the ranks of all politicians.
Isaiah Berlin, the great exponent of opening the mind to all views, at the conclusion of the introduction to his memorable collection of essays on Russian thinkers, wrote some words which should be inscribed on small plaques displayed prominently on the executive desks of every single politician in the land:
“The entire burden of my writings, so far as they can be said to display any single tendency, is distrust of all claims to the possession of incorrigible knowledge about issues of fact or principle in any sphere of human behaviour.”
