There is force in the indictment. And yet I am convinced that we
shall accomplish more by fighting for truth than by fighting for
our theories. It is a better loyalty. It is a humbler one, but it
is also more irresistible. Above all it is educative. For the real
enemy is ignorance, from which all of us, conservative, liberal,
and revolutionary, suffer. If our effort is concentrated on our
desires,--be it our desire to have and to hold what is good, our desire
to remake peacefully, or our desire to transform suddenly,--we shall
divide hopelessly and irretrievably. We must go back of our opinions to
the neutral facts for unity and refreshment of spirit. To deny this,
it seems to me, is to claim that the mass of men is impervious to
education, and to deny that, is to deny the postulate of democracy, and
to seek salvation in a dictatorship. There is, I am convinced, nothing
but misery and confusion that way. But I am equally convinced that
democracy will degenerate into this dictatorship either of the Right
or of the Left, if it does not become genuinely self-governing. That
means, in terms of public opinion, a resumption of that contact between
beliefs and realities which we have been losing steadily since the
small-town democracy was absorbed into the Great Society.
The administration of public information toward greater accuracy and
more successful analysis is the highway of liberty. It is, I believe,
a matter of first-rate importance that we should fix this in our
minds. Having done so, we may be able to deal more effectively with
the traps and the lies and the special interests which obstruct the
road and drive us astray. Without a clear conception of what the means
of liberty are, the struggle for free speech and free opinion easily
degenerates into a mere contest of opinion.
But realization is not the last step, though it is the first. We need
be under no illusion that the stream of news can be purified simply by
pointing out the value of purity. The existing news-structure may be
made serviceable to democracy along the general lines suggested, by the
training of the journalist, and by the development of expert record and
analysis. But while it may be, it will not be, simply by saying that it
ought to be. Those who are now in control have too much at stake, and
they control the source of reform itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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