And all that: re. 1984 redux

re: "1984 redux" re: "Reading Orwell for the Fourth of July" (The New York Times, July 4, 2020)

For doubters:
What thousands of years of civil society teach is that if respected as decent human persons, human persons tend to express themselves as ... decent human persons who want to contribute to the community.

Sure, you'll get radicals like Socrates, who question the conservative status quo so seriously that the guardians of decency just have to use the law to exact the final solution on him. How else could the innocent children be protected from his corruption?

And you'll get even worse extremists like that Galileo person who argued, with actual evidence of all the god-awful things, that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Again, it was thanks to the righteous efforts to protect innocents from his heresies that the popes managed for a while to suppress his evil incarnate.

But what we conspicuously did not get was a public sphere full of filthy language: that came, rather, from fulminating "protectors" condemning those new-fangled upstarts like Socrates and Galileo, or that even worse Jesus radical who caused the high priests of conservative Judaism such frenzied vituperation as they called on the law-and-order brigade to silence him with another final solution to the threat of free speech.

When free speech is protected, the decent people whose rights are protected continue to behave as decent people, however radical their ideas in the tradition of Socrates, Galileo, Jesus and all the others in that long line of ultra-radicals espousing shocking ideas.

_______________________________

The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to the The New York Times article.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/opinion/orwell-fourth-of-july.html#commentsContainer&permid=107946429:107948118