Mars Bluff is a small town outside Florence, South Carolina, the town where all four of my grandparents lived for many years. About fifty years ago it had its 15 minutes of fame when an atomic bomb fell out of an Air Force plane and exploded near the home of one Walter Gregg, injuring some of his family members and seriously damaging his house. Fortunately the bomb wasn’t loaded; the nuclear part of the weapon was still on the plane. Still, the explosion of the non-nuclear bits of the bomb created a mushroom cloud and left a sizable crater which you can still see today. It remains the greatest tourist attraction in the whole of Mars Bluff. Mr. Gregg went to his doctor, my grandfather, for treatment and spent the night at his house on Cherokee Road.
That’s pretty much it for Mars Bluff, South Carolina and for my family ties to the atom bomb; in Athens, Greece they have a Mars Hill or Areopagitica and it will likely be famous until the end of time. It’s famous partly because it is the first place where the Christian faith and Greek philosophy met one another; the Apostle Paul was invited to deliver a speech in defense of this strange new faith to the scholars and philosophers who gathered there for debate. That should be enough fame for any hill, but in addition John Milton named his pamphlet on the freedom of expression after the Athenian hill, and that pamphlet, published 365 years ago today, was no dud.
Areopagitica, as Milton called his pamphlet, was one of the most revolutionary documents ever penned. Not only did Milton call for the end of prior censorship of printed materials in England, he rested his case on a new way of looking at dissent.
“Where there is much desire to learn,” wrote Milton, “there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” Truth wasn’t an inheritance handed down from the past which we should maintain unchanged; it was something we had to discover by investigation and dispute. Diversity of opinion wasn’t a sign of heresy and social breakdown; it was the sign of “the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city.”
Truth, he wrote, does not need the help of government censorship or official support. “She [Truth] needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power:” Let there be free and full discussion and Truth will be seen and known in time.
The existence of dissenting opinions may make truth harder to discover, but the process of struggling for the truth, working through error, and defending the truth you have found in the open marketplace of ideas is what gives you the ability to value and act on what you know. As Milton put it, “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.”
It took a while, but by the reign of William III, England let its licensing laws lapse and from that time forward, books could be printed and distributed without prior clearance by government officials. That freedom opened the door to waves of intellectual and social progress; free dispute in matters of politics, science, ethics and religion has given us three centuries of progress.
It has also given us three centuries of error, blasphemy, slander and stupidity — although I suspect we would have had those in any case, but without the progress.
I think John Milton was right. That’s why I think the Turks are wrong to have a law against calling the Armenian genocide a genocide — and why I think the French and German laws against Holocaust and genocide denial, well intentioned as they undoubtedly are, should be repealed. Truth is not made by majorities; laws do not make it secure.
The self-appointed guardians of public safety and morality will always fight free speech. That is why the inquisitors burned heretics, but to silence an idea is not the same as refuting it. And once censorship starts, who is to say where it will end? The censors will always find reasons to extend their reach and increase their power.
But if John Milton did not believe that we should repress false speech, he also believed that we should not be indifferent to error. If somebody denies the Holocaust, you don’t put them in jail — but you can and should expose their stupidity, their ignorance and their bad faith.
Truth is something to be struggled for and treasured, not something to be passed into law and taken for granted.
So: have a happy Mars Hill day, and watch out for falling bombs.