An it harm none, do as ye will

I had wanted to be cheerful and blithe, but I’m not a good actress so I’ll just be morose, and retain some integrity. Marketers gleefully quoted Charles Bradlaugh today:

"Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race."

In true marketing style, the quote is out of context. Bradlaugh lived in different times and was not talking about sales. He was campaigning for Irish Home Rule, the redistribution of land, birth control, and atheists being allowed into the House of Commons, among other things. These creatures are campaigning for the sale of everything, from our children to the planet; together with many other things we had imagined were not for sale. As with so many freedoms, the ‘right’ to do such-and-such becomes nothing more than an excuse for doing it, in this insane Ripley’s version of a world. The ‘truth’ as applied to contemporary life is a dire culture of entitlement; with gratification as its sole aim, and its war cry has nothing to do with any kind of real freedom or real truth. I can think of many current instances in which the abuse of certain ‘freedoms’ has not died in a day, and is of itself busily entombing the hope of the species. If everyone lived in a little bubble of their own, and their words and actions could not affect the whole, then wholesale freedom of speech would be a fine thing. And although most of us think that we do in fact live in such a bubble, in reality not one of us can or does. We’re either oversensitive or desensitised, and both positions play straight into marketing’s hand.

In my ideal world, no one gets absolute freedom of anything until we have learned - and can apply - compassion, respect and tolerance. Impossible things to measure and truly difficult to practise, but by the time we’re eighty, maybe freedom can be ours in some small way. In the meantime, of course we should feel free to speak – if we think first. Marketing people better batten down the hatches and lay in some supplies, because if they’re to evolve from seething pond scum to thinking person with earned rights, at least three million years must pass.

Nice Dream.

Long live Bradlaugh, and a pox on those who take his name in vain.


In the spirit of the season, here’s something by Ogden Nash:


A Carol for Children (Abridged)

God rest you, merry innocents,
Let nothing you dismay,
Let nothing wound an eager heart
Upon this Christmas day.

Yours be the genial holly wreaths,
The stockings and the tree;
An aged world to you bequeaths
Its own forgotten glee.

Soon, soon enough come crueller gifts,
The anger and the tears;
Between you now there sparsely drifts
A handful yet of years.

Oh dimly, dimly glows the star
Through the electric throng;
The bidding in temple and bazaar
Drowns out the silver song.

Two ultimate laws alone we know,
The ledger and the sword –
So far away, so long ago,
We lost the infant lord.

God rest you, merry innocents,
While innocence endures.
A sweeter Christmas than we to ours
May you bequeath to yours.