Mill

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill drew one of the most important lines in the history of political thought, a line we are still arguing about every day. There is a single, simple principle, he proposed, that should govern when society may interfere with a person's freedom: the only justification for coercing anyone, by law or by social pressure, against their will, is to prevent them from harming others. That is the whole of it. Over the part of your life that concerns only yourself, your own body, your own mind, your own choices, you are sovereign, and no one, not the state, not the majority, not your neighbors, has the right to force you to live differently for your own good. They may argue with you, plead, try to persuade; they may not compel. This is the harm principle, the load-bearing idea of modern liberalism, and its radical core is the refusal of paternalism: the insistence that a free adult has the right to make their own mistakes, even to wreck their own life if they so choose, because the alternative, letting others run your life for your own benefit, is a deeper harm than any folly you might commit on your own. Almost every live argument about freedom, over speech, over what we may put in our bodies, over how we are allowed to live and love and die, is still being fought along the line Mill drew.

Why even the wrong must speak. Mill applied his principle most powerfully to the freedom of thought and speech, and his defense of it is the deepest anyone has written. We must protect, he argued, even the opinions we are certain are false, and his reasons are not the easy ones. First, we might be wrong. Every age has been sure of things that turned out to be errors, and to silence an opinion because we are confident it is false is to assume an infallibility no human being possesses. Second, even a mostly false opinion usually carries a fragment of truth we need, and only by letting it speak do we recover that fragment. And third, most strikingly, even an opinion that is wholly true needs its opponents, because a truth that is never challenged, never forced to defend itself, slowly hardens into a "dead dogma," a slogan repeated by rote and held without any living understanding of why it is true. The clash with error, Mill saw, is not a threat to truth but the very thing that keeps it alive. This is the opposite of "anything goes"; it is a profound argument about human fallibility and the fragility of understanding, and it is more urgent now, in an age tempted on all sides to silence whatever it finds offensive, than it was when Mill wrote it. He grasped the hardest thing about free speech: that you defend it not for the speech you love, but for the speech you are sure is wrong, because the day you begin silencing error is the day you quietly appoint yourself infallible.

A human being is not a machine. Mill cared about liberty for a reason deeper than rights, and it is the most beautiful idea in his philosophy. A human being, he believed, is not a machine to be built to a pattern but something more like a tree, "which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing." People differ; they flourish in different ways; and the whole point of freedom is to let each person grow into the distinctive shape that is theirs, to run their own "experiments in living" and find out what kind of life is genuinely their own to lead. This is why Mill feared, more than tyranny by any government, the tyranny of the majority, the soft, suffocating pressure of social conformity, of custom and respectability and "what people will think," which crushes individuality not with laws but with disapproval, and grinds every person down toward the same dull average. A society that succeeds in making everyone alike, he warned, may be peaceful and orderly, but it will have killed the very thing that makes life worth living and progress possible: the free, various, sometimes eccentric development of distinct human beings. Conformity was, for Mill, a kind of death, and the defense of the odd, the original, the person who does not fit, was the defense of life itself.

Better to be Socrates dissatisfied. Where did this passion for the whole human being come from? In part, from Mill's own near-destruction. He was raised as an experiment, his brilliant, severe father putting him through a forced march of an education, Greek at three, logic and economics in childhood, designed to manufacture a perfect reasoning machine for the cause of reform. And it nearly worked, and nearly destroyed him. At twenty, Mill sank into a deep depression, and the trigger was a terrible question he put to himself: if everything you are working for came true tomorrow, every reform achieved, would you be happy? The honest answer was no. The calculating machine had been built and found hollow; the education had starved his capacity for feeling. What saved him, famously, was poetry, the verse of Wordsworth, which woke the emotional life his training had neglected and taught him that there are joys, and depths, that no ledger of pleasures can reach. He never forgot the lesson, and it reshaped his ethics. Against his teachers, who had measured happiness by sheer quantity of pleasure, Mill insisted that pleasures differ in kind, that there are higher goods and lower ones, and that a person who has truly known the higher will never trade down. "It is better," he wrote, in his most famous line, "to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." A philosophy of happiness born in the wreck of a happiness-machine, it never again mistook mere contentment for the goal, or forgot that the cultivation of mind and feeling matters more than the sum of comforts.

The equal half. Mill did not develop his liberalism alone, and the great partnership of his life shaped its noblest application. Harriet Taylor was his intellectual equal and closest collaborator, and Mill credited her, generously and probably accurately, with much of what is best in his mature thought; together they turned his philosophy of liberty toward the people it had most conspicuously left out. In The Subjection of Women, written decades before such things could be said in polite company, Mill argued that the legal inferiority of women was a barbaric survival in a society that prided itself on running by reason and consent. The marriage law of his day, he pointed out, gave one human being nearly total power over another; and the confident claim that women were naturally the inferiors of men was worthless, because no one could possibly know what women were capable of when women had never once been allowed the conditions to develop, which was exactly Wollstonecraft's argument, now pressed by the most respected philosopher in England. As a member of Parliament, Mill became the first person ever to propose votes for women in the House of Commons. He lost the vote, of course. But he had put the question on the floor of the world's most powerful legislature, and it would not come off again until it was won.

The creed of a free society. The room holds all of Mill's major works in their original English, cited by chapter; he is a clear, careful, deeply humane writer, the best kind of public philosopher, who wrote to be understood and to change the world, and did both. His whole philosophy comes down, in the end, to a single generous faith: that human beings, left free to think, to speak, to grow, and to make their own mistakes, will make more of themselves and of the world than any authority, however wise or well-meaning, could ever make of them by force. He had reason to believe it, having been so nearly ruined by a benevolent authority that was certain it knew best. It is the founding creed of the open society, and it comes under pressure in every generation, including ours, from the perennial temptation to silence what offends us, to coerce people for their own good, to grind the awkward and the dissenting into line. Against all of it stands Mill's quiet, stubborn line: that your life is your own, that the cure for bad ideas is better ideas and not enforced silence, and that a society is worth exactly as much as the free, various, fully developed human beings it is willing to let its people become.