Interestingly, there is a sense of let down - that freedom didn't, in the end, mean freedom in the sense that Mill had hoped for. I turn the keyboard over:
"Mill has a principle of liberty, but far more important is that he starts a practice of liberal thought. ... When he asks us to think about liberty, he doesn't want us to ask, Can this odd thing people are doing be deduced from some ethical axiom, that lets me call it "good," and permits them to go on doing it? He wants us to ask something simpler: Is this practice causing me any real harm? Not potential harm to my feelings, not social harm to my idea of right, not damage to the great precepts of religion or to my stuffy uncle's sense of propriety. Unless the speaker is actually about to cut your throat, you have to let him work his jaw."And later
"Mill's theory of freedom does make an unwarranted assumption -- that people want a rich life where knowledge increases, new discoveries are made, and new ideas found, where art flourishes and science advances. If you don't want that kind of society, you don't want liberty, in Mill's sense. Part of what makes him as touching as he is great is that is scarcely occurred to him that anyone would not."Mill seems to have too-late realized that conservative opposition to his ideas was due to the fact that there are things that liberty would demand, that many simply cannot tolerate.
"[Mill] became notorious for once having described the Conservatives as "necessarily the stupidest party." ... He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one's own case to consider it as one of many.... The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another's shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.
"There is a non-stupid conservative reproach to Mill. It is that his great success at changing minds has made a world in which there is not much of a role for people like him. Mill and Harriet, to a degree that they could hardly recognize, flourished within a whole set of social assumptions and shared beliefs. Respect for mind, space for argument, the dispersal of that respect throughout the population, even the existence of a rentier class who could spend their time with ideas - all of these things were possible in a society that was far more hierarchical and elitist than the society they dreamed of and helped to bring about."
"You can also fault Mill for the grasping something that a crazy reactionary like his friend Carlyle recognized: the depths of violence and rage and hatred beneath the thin shell of civilization. Mill is like a man who has spent his life on one of those moving walkways you find in airports. He takes the forward movement so much for granted that he never makes it his subject. "Most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits," he wrote, a little too assuredly"Okay, maybe the title of this post is inaccurate, I'd like to think Mill would have recognized the danger. Mr. Gopnik says there is something touching about Mills' naivete. Maybe that is so. What I find interesting is the way he at once so inspiring, maybe universally so, and at the same time so infuriating. I suspect most of us are really just stupid conservatives.
That line about conservatism being "complicated" is pretty funny too.
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