This is J.S. Mill's gift to the world

Yesterday while in one of Melbourne's busy shopping Malls my attention was suddenly riveted by a big lump of man who was holding his four-year-old daughter's hand and swaggering towards the crowd of mothers waiting to take their toddlers to Santa Claus. Why was my attention riveted? It's after all just the sort of scene that gives one a warm feeling that not all is lost in the world, that kids can still experience the wonder and joy of talking to the man in a white beard and red suit, and look forward to Christmas morning when they open their presents.

This great big lump of a man wore a black T-shirt and in big white letters over the back was what nobody could miss:

THE HEAD F---KING MACHINE

There he was full of swaggering arrogance, and protected by a class who takes its orders from and worships at the shrine of a man the average person has never heard of. Take my word on it: all civil liberties lawyers and civil liberties groups are drooling disciples of this man. The whole PC-class quote him when it suits their purposes. That is, they quote him when they judge something is allowed to be done or said and ignore him when it goes against their dogma. His name is John Stuart Mill and he wrote an essay (1859) which has been one of the most influential essays in modern times. The essay, ON LIBERTY, provided a set of arguments that Mill's devotees claim justify free speech.

It's not necessary to provide the detail of those arguments, at the core of which are the propositions that nobody holds the truth and that the clash of opinions will produce the (provisional) truth - and an enlightened society. Or my assessment of them. My proposition is that this one man indulging in behaviour deeply and gratuitously offensive to ninety-nine percent of people and getting away with it is all that need be said. Free speech in a liberal democratic society is important. But, as Edmund Burke pointed out, rights which don't presuppose a happy, healthy and moral society are no rights at all. It's a travesty to talk of a right that befouls and undermines the civil society which it is meant to protect.

Burke outlined his arguments against individual subjective rights up until his death in 1797. As his interventions in the American taxation issue demonstrated, he supported the idea of a liberal society, but one whose rights and freedoms were limited by enduring moral principles and the society's organic structure. It was a non-rationalist analysis of rights and duties. But Mill's rationalist abstract theory prevailed. His adherents in civil liberties groups are not about to take more notice of Burke and his arguments - and even less of the Pope Leo XIII's discussion of rights and responsibilities in his seminal letters and encyclicals. That discussion was even more insistent that rights were subject to an objective moral order. Mill's multitude of adherents are blind to circumstances; they only see words on paper or hear sounds in the air. And so the befouling and undermining of our liberal democratic society will go ahead and people like that great lump of man and his offensive behaviour will be protected.

And when someone like Sarah Palin has the courage to stand up and speak against the decay represented by that swaggering great lump of a man who couldn't give a damn about his fellow citizen, ordinary people oppressed by the dogma of the dominant political class will rush with their support.

comments: gerardwilson@dodo.com.au