Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Vaclav Havel, the playwright who became the first President of a free Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Warsaw Pact, once said that the worst thing that the Communists did to him was to make him flinch internally. Out of a learned fear and the fresh memory of pain, he began to censor himself before saying or writing anything.
This second-guessing hesitation is poisonous to anyone purporting to explore truth and the human condition. Through arrest for thought crime, imprisonment, and torture, the Party made Havel complicit in his own oppression. It is a credit to his character that he overcame this programming to become one of the red regime’s most eloquent critics.
The highest duty of any person of integrity is fidelity to the truth, at least to the truth as he or she understands it. That truth can be the love of a father for his child, a husband for his wife, a son for his parents. It can be the love of Our Lord for a fallen humanity in desperate need of salvation, or echoes of that divine love found in the compassion of men and women for those who are in need.
Truth can be an unprovable conviction about how and why existence operates. It can be a faith that virtue is superior to vice, that creation is better than destruction. It can simply be an insistence not to ease one’s way through life by telling “little white lies”.
As should be self-evident, truth can be a giant pain in the neck. Whether it is scientific truth, mathematical truth, or philosophical truth, it cares not for our convenience or our feelings. Expediency, doing what is easy, is almost never compatible with serving truth.
This is because human society has little toleration for dissent. Novel ideas are rarely welcomed. Most often, they are violently suppressed.
For example, the Jews have been hounded for the better part of four thousand years because they insist on bucking the trends around them. They insist on the reality that they alone had a special relationship with the One True God.
This was and remains offensive to many who worship other gods. Followers of Baal, Mammon, Ahura Mazda, Zeus, the Most Holy Trinity, Allah, Descartes, and Marx have all, in their time, inflicted measureless suffering upon the Jewish people. By boldly standing apart, Jews became and remain the targets of countless Anti-Semites.
The reason why truth is so risky is that genuine truth does not belong to us. It cannot be modified to suit our whims. If we are fortunate enough to actually perceive something truly, it is a blessing more than it is an achievement. In such moments of clarity, we are gifted with something that exists beyond us and apart from us. We may be temporary stewards of truth. We are not its owners.
Spoken and written expression are closer to our most intimate minds than anything else. The distance between thought and word is infinitesimal. That is chiefly why there can be no genuine liberty without free speech. A person simply cannot think clearly absent the ability to express such thought boldly. Many ideas would never even fully form without being tested by expressing them in specific words.
Censorship, for any reason and in any form, suppresses human imagination, intuition, and creativity. It blinders the mind’s eye, and stifles innovation. It betrays life’s vibrancy, excitement, and joy.
Censors try to put training wheels on each individual mind within a society they control. They offer the illusion of security in a world without limits. Enforcing thought crime laws never improves our lot. Instead, our world is made mediocre, gray, and joyless.
Accept no substitutes. Freedom of speech is freedom!
