In Praise of Intolerance

How the Grotesque Activities of Modern Reformers Have Come to Have a Beneficial Effect

ALDOUS HUXLEY

THE world's most ancient and most universally popular sport is heresy-hunting —or to be more precise (for the heresy, being an abstraction, cannot be hunted) heretic-baiting. To the pleasures, already intense, of being one of a great unanimous herd and of maltreating a fellow human being, the heretic-baiter can add the consummate pleasure of being consciously virtuous, of knowing himself on the right side. He can persecute with a good conscience; he knows that his intolerances and cruelties are pleasing to the Almighty. Humanitarian sentiment, translated in many cases into humanitarian law, has condemned most of the organized cruelties with which men have been accustomed to amuse themselves. Of all the sanguinary sports of the arena only bull fighting lingers on, and lingers only in Spain and Mexico. Bears are no longer baited, cocks are no more trained to fight, the coursing greyhound now pursues an electric hare and, except at Monte Carlo, competitive pigeonshooting is practised on clay birds. Against fox hunting, stag hunting, otter hunting the feeling in most Western countries is already strong; sooner or later, and probably sooner, it will provide itself with legal sanctions and these now fashionable amusements of the rich will go the way of gladiatorial shows and public executions.

LAST of the unprotected animals, only the heretic remains to be baited. And even the heretic now enjoys a certain measure of immunity from persecution. So profound, so all-pervasive have been the ravages of humanitarianism that even Good Citizens, even True Believers, even All Right Thinking Men now think twice before taking violent action against wrong thinkers, false believers and bad citizens. There has been a general mitigation of savagery. Heretics are now less frequently tortured and killed than in the past. The only heretics who now run the risk of being burnt alive are those who happen to have black skins and whose misfortune it is to have been born in the lynching belt of North America. To have the wrong economic opinions and the wrong educational antecedents is almost as dangerous under the Soviets as to have the wrong skin and the wrong amorous tastes in the southern states of the American Union. Death by shooting, hanging or, less mercifully, by imprisonment on the shores of some polar sea awaits the economic heretic in Russia. His position is not much better in other countries. He is not killed, it is true—except in Spain and Italy and occasionally, more or less by mistake, elsewhere; but he is sent to jail, he is vituperated, he is often socially ostracized. Strangely enough, that class of heretics which suffered most severely in the past—the class of religious heretics—enjoys at the present time a relative immunity from persecution. This is due in part to the general decline in savagery, but chiefly to the fact that organized religion has lost most of its significance in the eyes of modern Western men, who are much more interested in money than in the soul. Indeed, the question of property is the major religious question of modern times. (Incidentally, it was always important, as the opposition to the communistic Early Christians and later to the property-less Franciscans, so eloquently testifies. But it was always subsidiary to other considerations. In the past men attacked property because property was bad for the soul. The modern socialist is uninterested in the soul; indeed, if he is an orthodox disciple of Lenin, he does not believe in its existence.) Economic heretics are thus seen to be the modern equivalents of religious heretics. It is against Communists and Socialists, not against Arians, Donatists, Albigenses that All Right Thinking Men now rage. But these wrong-thinking economists are not the only subjects of his righteous indignation. (Oh, the pleasure of being righteously indignant!) There are also the sexual heretics. The baiting of these miscreants is one of the most popular amusements of modern times.

THE British Isles have recently been the scene of some very amusing cases (amusing, at any rate, for the onlookers) of sexual heretic baiting.

The most notorious of these was the case of The Well of Loneliness. The Well of Loneliness is a very earnest and rather dull novel of propaganda, a novel with a purpose. The purpose was to prove to all those who did not know it already—it seems remarkable that there should be such people, but the world is apparently full of men and women who desire to remain ignorant—that homosexuals, at any rate some homosexuals, are like poets, and musicians—born, not made. (Though even if they were all made, not born, it is very difficult to see what there would be to worry about.) Miss Hall, the authoress of the book, constructs a most elaborate mythos to demonstrate that her heroine simply could not help her "peculiar" emotional reactions and that what the virtuous stigmatize as unnatural emotions were in her case eminently natural. The book was duly published and circulated, and nobody paid very much attention to it, until a certain Mr. James Douglas, the editor of the Sunday Express, came out with one of those high-moral denunciations which, along with divorce case reports, photographs of bathing beauties and murder stories, are the staple attraction of Sabbath-day journalism. Mr. Douglas is that rare and, to the newspaper proprietor, extremely valuable person—a writer of Sunday articles who really believes in his own sermons. He has the great and precious gift of hysteria. He can work himself up almost instantaneously into a state of rhapsodical fury or raving admiration. I myself, for example, have been the subject both of his indignation and his praise. He has denounced me as a limb of Satan and extolled me as the Ibsen, the Homer, the goodness knows who else of my age. On Miss Hall he descended with all the force of his righteous indignation. "I would rather," he said, "give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel." (And here let me pause to make Mr. Douglas a sporting offer. I will provide a healthy boy, a phial of prussic acid and a copy of The Well of Loneliness, and if he keeps his word and gives the boy the prussic acid I undertake to pay all the expenses of his defence at the ensuing murder trial and to erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged.) Having denounced, Mr. Douglas went on to demand repressive measures. Let the inquisition come into action, let the book be suppressed, let the publisher be punished and the author hounded out of society! And, incredible as it may seem, the machinery of government was actually set in motion at Mr. Douglas's hysterical command. The Home Secretary made a touching speech about offending the "least of these little ones" and the book was withdrawn.

There was a time when I should have found such an incident infuriating and humiliating. It would have hurt not only my national but even my human pride—would have made me feel ashamed of belonging to a species whose members were capable of behaving in so hopelessly silly a manner.

NOW I am rather pleased than distressed when such things happen. I have given up taking the shortcomings of the human race to heart. (Taking them to heart did no good to the human race and quite a lot of harm to me.) I only laugh. James Douglas and the Home Secretary are deplorable phenomena, no doubt; but oh, how comic, how richly ludicrous, how enormously grotesque! I feel almost grateful to them for giving me so much amusement. I am grateful too (for even with the best will in the world one cannot entirely forget the human race), because their absurd and laughter-provoking intolerance does nothing but good to the cause against which it is directed. For though it is untrue to say that the blood of the martyrs is invariably the seed of the church (since a really efficient and ruthless persecution can martyrize the whole church and so wipe it off the face of the earth, as the Inquisition wiped Protestantism from the face of Spain), it is certainly true that a little persecution, particularly if it be ill-considered and preposterous, is stimulating and tonifying. James Douglas and Joynson Hicks have done much more for liberty by suppressing The Well of Loneliness, and covering themselves with ridicule in the process, than fifty earnest lovers of freedom could have done by writing fifty Areopagiticas. The Irish Free State has done even more; for the censorship which it has set up is so manifestly and enormously idiotic that even the most stolid, the most Podsnapian believers in respectability cannot fail to be driven by reaction against it into an ardent passion for intellectual and moral freedom. According to the latest information, the Irish authorities have laid an embargo on the importation of the Times Literary Supplement, on the ground apparently that it contains reviews of books, of whose very existence the Hibernians must at all costs be kept unaw-are. If this is true—and I hope and believe that my information is correct— then the Free State (how appropriately named!) has struck the greatest blow for intellectual liberty that has been struck since the days of the Reformation. For ridicule is the most effective arm against repression. The Irish repression being ridiculous is thus seen to be self-destructive. My own hope is, not that the authorities will repent and relax their censorship, but that, on the contrary, they will make it much more stringent. I shall not be satisfied until the Church Times is confiscated by the Dublin Customs officials and Cranford publicly burnt on Stephen's Green. Even in geometry the reductio ad absurdum is regarded as a valid proof. In life it is even more cogent. That is why I am for every sort of repressive idiocy. So long as it is not perfectly efficient —and it is very difficult to make censorship efficient—so long as it stops short of actual violence, repressive legislation does nothing but good; for it makes people actively aware of the superlative ridiculousness of repression.

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In the end it turns out that James Douglas and Joynson Hicks, the Irish Free State and the Fundamentalists are human benefactors. Long may they continue their beneficent and grotesque activities!