The Art of Knowing When to Speak

by Theodore Dalrymple (December 2025)

 

Advocates of free speech, of which I count myself one, often refer to self-censorship disparagingly, as if it were an evil in all circumstances. They cite as evidence of the atmosphere of intellectual terror in which we now live surveys in which students or academics say that they have self-censored on controversial subjects.

I do not deny that such an atmosphere exists—although perhaps terror is too strong a word, possibly self-pitying or self-exculpatory, for it, given the truly terrifying regimes that have existed in history and still exist around the world. There is always a temptation to use the strongest possible rhetorical term for what we decry, in an attempt to demonstrate how deeply we feel, but it is intellectually irresponsible to do so, for it leaves us wordless in the face of the very worst.

The misuse of the word genocide, for example, is particularly egregious. I think its use as a designation of slaughter should be confined to the deliberate extermination, either successful or attempted, of an entire ethnic group, or a group that is believed to be ethnically distinct, within a territory. It is a crime of relatively infrequent occurrence, at least by comparison with other mass crimes, obvious examples being the Holocaust and the killing of the Tutsis in Rwanda.

Nothing human is entirely clear-cut, however. For example, should the killing of whites under the orders of Dessalines in Haiti in the wake of the first successful slave revolt in history count as a genocide? Perhaps the reason it is not generally included in the list is that it involved relatively small numbers (5000 at most) and is felt to have been a psychologically explicable and morally justifiable act of revenge for generations of hideously cruel usage. It is true that Polish soldiers who had initially been sent to Haiti to serve in the Napoleonic attempt to regain and retain control of the slave colony, but who had changed sides and joined the rebels, were excluded from Dessalines’ order to kill all whites, as were Germans who had never played any part in the slave trade. But, to have killed 90 per cent of an identifiable ethnic minority—including women and children—must be very near to genocide. As to its supposed justification, when the left-wing British publisher Victor Gollancz, who was himself Jewish and therefore an unlikely sympathiser with Nazism, heard people say immediately after the end of the Second World War that the Germans deserved their near starvation, he replied, ‘And the children?’ French children were not exempted from Dessalines’ order.

But to return to the question of self-censorship. As Doctor Johnson put it, he who will attend to the motions of his own mind, or at any rate to the contents of his own mind, will soon realise that self-censorship is a precondition of any possible civilised social life. The way to be a bore, said Voltaire, is to say everything; one might add that it is also the way to be a boor.

Complete and universal frankness would be a nightmare, and disinhibition—a condition in which people no longer filter their thoughts or actions through a necessary mesh of social convention—is not generally regarded as desirable. The garrulous drunk, the person rendered voluble by excitatory drugs or endogenous illness, is not usually taken as a model to follow, quite the reverse. And even the person who is not drunk, or under the influence of drugs, or mentally deranged by illness, but who habitually says the first thing that comes into his head, is regarded not so much as honest as ill-mannered. We would not confide secrets to a person who felt under a Kantian obligation always to blurt out the truth if asked a question about those secrets. Our ability to trust one another depends on our perceived powers of self-censorship.

It is an ineradicable feature of civilised social life that discussions that are appropriate in one circumstance are not appropriate in another. For example, I am not in the slightest religious—though I do not go quite as far as Machiavel, the personage who is the prologue in Christopher Marlowe’s play, The Jew of Malta, who says ‘I count religion but a childish toy/ And hold there is no sin but ignorance’ —but when I meet a religious person I do not at once launch into my reasons for not believing in God, or point to what I think are the contradictions of any given religious doctrine. This is not only because I think that religious people, provided they are not theocrats, tend to be better people than the irreligious, at least in our present irreligious society, but because there is more to good social relations than putting one’s philosophical cards constantly on the table. Opinion, if I may offer one, is an overestimated component of a person’s character; other aspects are more important, and taste is as least as important. Indeed, people are often more divided by taste than by opinion, though if surveys are to be believed, people are less tolerant of differences of opinion than they were within living memory, or even than they were two or three decades ago.

Here let me digress once more, this time on to the subject of tolerance, the nature of which many people misunderstand. They think that tolerance implies refusal to make a judgment, and requires what they call non-judgmentalism, but this is an obvious mistake. Everyone, presumably, can tolerate what he approves of or is indifferent towards; tolerance requires a willingness to judge adversely, or it would not be necessary. One tolerates what one dislikes, not what one likes; and therefore, toleration is the willing suspension of our natural inclination to try to suppress or even punish what we dislike. Some people, of course, find such suspension easier than do others, partly as a matter of temperament and partly as a matter of deliberate self-control informed by philosophical reasoning, which then becomes habitual with them. A tolerant person is not a person who is indifferent to everything, but one who has made, by practice and repetition, the limitation of the expression of his dislike or disapproval part of his character.

When to self-censor and when to let rip, so to speak, is always a matter of judgment, and judgment is fallible. Restraint is pusillanimity in one situation, but politeness in another. How one discusses a subject with an interlocutor—what language to use, how forceful and uncompromising to be, what euphemisms, if any, to employ, what amount of humour, irony or contempt to express, and so forth—depends, or ought depend, on social circumstances. If humankind cannot bear too much reality, neither can many people bear too much plain speaking: and if nothing much hangs on a conversation, the avoidance of giving offence is an important consideration.

There is no hard and fast rule about when it is permissible—morally permissible, that is, not legally permissible—to cause offence by what one says. A blanket legal permission, such as that offered by the First Amendment, does not end the question, unless you take the incipiently totalitarian view that legal permissibility is the only kind of permissibility that there is. It is true that some people say, in defending their bad behaviour, ‘There is no law against it,’ but they generally do not pause to consider the corollary, that they have outsourced the criteria of all moral judgment to the legislature.

There can be no freedom of expression without the freedom to give offence, which is not the same as saying that knowingly to give offence, without good reason for doing so, is admirable or good in itself (except, possibly, in circumstances of overwhelming social complacency, when giving offence acts like the stirring of a pot in which, without it, a dish would burn). There can, of course, be no such freedom as freedom from offence, because such a freedom would prevent us from saying anything whatever, at least in public, since anyone can at any time claim to be offended by anything. Indeed, taking offence is a little like appetite which grows with feeding: and where there are advantages, social, psychological, legal and even economic, to taking offence, people will quickly turn themselves into eggshell.

Not only is there no right to be protected from the offence that you take yourself, but I would say that there is a duty to restrain the offence that you take, and to try to make it proportionate to its cause, as punishment should be proportionate to the crime. This is in fact very difficult to do: as a matter of empirical fact, I am more genuinely angry at the delay to my train than at a bomb outrage on the other side of the world, though I have no doubts as to which of the two is the more serious, morally speaking.

I doubt that I am unique in this: it is a consequence of the limitation of the human mind and emotions. This being the case, it seems to me that we have a duty to be wary, or even suspicious, of our own tendency to outrage, all the more so since outrage is so gratifying an emotion, deluding us (often) into supposing that we thereby prove our generosity of spirit and concern for others.

Again, this is not to say that outrage is never justified, that we should accept everything with a Buddha-like calm. Anger and outrage can be generous, and I think here of Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens, when Orwell tries at the end to imagine Dickens’s face:

 

He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

 

Notwithstanding the possibility of generous anger, we must always be aware of anger’s self-reinforcing quality, and the pleasure it may give us.

There are many reasons for biting one’s tongue. In totalitarian dictatorships, biting one’s tongue—not revealing to the authorities all that one knows about someone’s political disaffection is regarded as a crime, but doing so may be an act of heroism.

It has become a rule of medical ethics that doctors should tell their patients the truth, and no doubt on most occasions it is right for them to do so. Nevertheless, the doctor is under an obligation to do what he thinks is in the best interest of his patient, which may not be to tell him the unvarnished truth, certainly not that, for example, he is testing his blood, inter alia, for syphilis because there is a faint possibility that his condition is attributable to that disease – a suspicion that might very well offend or alarm, and might destroy trust. A doctor’s estimate of his patient’s capacity to bear the truth can be mistaken, but as Hippocrates said some time ago, the art is long, life is short, the occasion fleeting and judgment difficult. He who wants invariable rules such as when to speak one’s mind and when not to do so is a person who cannot stand the inevitable complexity of human existence. At no time are we free of the need to exercise (or not) self-censorship.

Shakespeare knew this. It is necessary even in the most intimate of relations, indeed is almost a precondition of any successful intimacy. Sonnet 138 expresses this perfectly:

 

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
____Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
____And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

 

It is not self-censorship that it is wrong; it is self-censorship for the wrong reasons that is wrong.

 

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Theodore Dalrymple’s latest books are Neither Trumpets nor Violins (with Kenneth Francis and Samuel Hux) and Ramses: A Memoir from New English Review Press.

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