I’ve expended a fair amount of ink criticizing John Stuart Mill’s ideas about liberty in his (in)famous 1859 pamphlet “On Liberty.”
I think that Mill’s greatest critic, James Fitzjames Stephen, was right about Mill.
In his devastating polemic “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” Stephen criticized various aspects of Mill’s teaching, especially the anemic, abstract nature of his idea of liberty and the “great defect” upon which it rests: “too favorable an estimate of human nature.”
In my judgment, Stephen made (as philosopher David Stove put it) “mincemeat” of Mill’s arguments.
But that was only intellectually, in terms of the cogency of Stephen’s arguments.
In the court of public opinion, Mill won hands down.
His seductive sermons about how “exceptional individuals” (that would be you, dear reader) could only realize themselves by indulging in “experiments in living,” and his claim that “society has no business as society to decide anything to be wrong which concerns only the individual” set susceptible hearts racing.
Ditto Mill’s idea that only “the collision of adverse opinions” could secure the “rational assurance” that a truly enlightened society required.
Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb was right that “by making truth so dependent upon error as to require not only the freest circulation of error but its deliberate cultivation, [Mill] reinforced the relativism of later generations.”
I think all of that is correct.
But I’m developing a soft spot for certain aspects of Mill’s teaching.
His anthropology might be superficial to the point of being fantastic.
But if Mill didn’t have the last word on liberty, his insistence that we pay attention to competing points of view offered a healthy and pragmatic first step toward productive intellectual engagement.
These days, when open debate on many contentious issues is discouraged if not actively forbidden, Mill can be a useful ally.
It’s an extraordinary effusion.
By “extraordinary,” I don’t mean “good.”
On the contrary, it’s a deeply objectionable piece.
My objection is of two varieties.
In terms of the character of the person it reveals, “Abort the Conversation” is an exhibition of eye-watering narcissism and self-infatuation.
Nam was infuriated that some fellow students should have had the temerity to host a pro-life exhibition at a public space on campus.
Not only were they there with their pamphlets and illustrations, but they were also “polite” and “logical”! What an insult!
“The students were inviting passersby to engage in logical debates about fetal personhood and abortion ethics. They were polite. They held their voices low and spoke slowly and calmly. They had relaxed, open smiles.”
Nam found this insupportable: “‘Would you like to discuss this? Let’s talk about it respectfully,’ they insisted. ‘We can debate about this.’
“Their smug civility was infuriating, their invitations for debate, inflammatory.
“I could barely seethe out my opinion about the misogyny of holding such a debate at all.”
Even talking about abortion, Nam concluded, is “an insult to our personhood, experience and rights.”
“Our personhood.” What about the personhood of the unborn child?
That’s a question that Nam can’t entertain.
“The discussion never should have been entertained,” she wrote, “because simply opening space for this ‘logical, respectful’ debate itself is a threat to human rights that should never be up for debate.”
Which brings me to the intellectual side of Nam’s argument.
Like proto-totalitarians from Thrasymachus on down, Nam simply rejects opinions with which she disagrees.
There’s no room for debate. No room for that Millian “collision of adverse opinions.”
And remember, we aren’t talking about an opinion that’s outside the orbit of respectable discourse.
A huge percentage of Americans have opposed unlimited abortion.
But the specific issue is almost beside the point.
Here we have a privileged beneficiary of one of the most elite educations in the world.
What does she conclude?
That only her opinion about a fraught, much-debated topic deserves to be heard.
It signals not only a failure of Yale but also a moral and intellectual miscarriage that’s as frightening as it is repellant.
There are plenty of things to criticize about John Stuart Mill.
But in the intolerant atmosphere of contemporary America, he’s a most welcome cicerone.
