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Free Speech And Why It Matters 1st Edition Andrew Doyle
Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy
How we understand, protect, and discharge our rights and responsibilities as citizens in a democratic society committed to the principle of political equality is intimately connected to the standards and behaviour of our media in general, and our news media in particular. However, the media does not just stand between the citizenry and their leaders, or indeed between citizens and each other. The media is often the site where individuals attempt to realise some of the most fundamental democratic liberties, including the right to free speech.
Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy explores the conflict between the rights that people exercise in, and through, the modern media and the responsibilities that accrue on account of its awesome and increasing power. The individual chapters—written by leading scholars from the U.S., U.K., and Australia—address several recent events and controversial developments in the media, including Brexit, the rise of Trump, Lynton Crosby, Charlie Hebdo, dogwhistle politics, fake news, and political correctness. This much-needed philosophical treatment is a welcome addition to the recent literature in media ethics. It will be of interest to scholars across political and social philosophy, applied ethics, media and communication studies, and political science who are interested in the important issues surrounding the media and free speech and democracy.
Carl Fox is a lecturer at the IDEA Centre in the University of Leeds. He won the 2014 Robert Papazian Essay Prize for his paper on “Political Authority, Practical Identity, and Binding Citizens”. He has also worked as a sub-editor on the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent, and Evening Herald.
Joe Saunders is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Durham University. Funnily enough, he also won the Robert Papazian Essay Prize in 2015 for his paper “Kant and the Problem of Recognition”. He currently works on freedom, love, media ethics, Kant, and the post-Kantian tradition.
Routledge Research in Applied Ethics
Hobbesian Applied Ethics and Public Policy
Edited by Shane D. Courtland
Does the Pro-Life Worldview Make Sense?
Abortion, Hell, and Violence Against Abortion Doctors
Stephen Kershnar
The Injustice of Punishment
Bruce N. Waller
Friendship, Robots, and Social Media
False Friends and Second Selves
Alexis M. Elder
The Capability Approach in Practice
A New Ethics for Setting Development Agendas
Morten Fibieger Byskov
The Ethics of Counterterrorism
Isaac Taylor
Disability with Dignity
Justice, Human Rights and Equal Status
Linda Barclay
Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy
Edited by Carl Fox and Joe Saunders
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Applied-Ethics/book-series/RRAES
Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy
Edited by Carl Fox and Joe Saunders
First published 2019 by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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The right of Carl Fox and Joe Saunders to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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Acknowledgements
We have a lot of people to thank for helping us to bring this project to fruition. First of all, a large thanks to our authors, who have made this such a worthwhile endeavour for us. Numerous people warned us against editing a collection, sharing horror stories about their attempts to get academics to follow through on promises, but our contributors have been incredibly easy to work with from start to finish and have produced some excellent, thought-provoking chapters.
Speaking of the start, we want to thank the Society for Applied Philosophy, who provided us with funding to host a conference on media ethics in Leeds in 2016. This book has grown in scope since then, but that was the initial impetus, and we would like to thank everyone who came. We owe additional thanks to the Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied (IDEA) Centre in the University of Leeds, which hosted the conference, and to Chris Megone, Kathyrn Blythe, Florence Carr, and Sarah Foster for making that event possible.
And, closer to the finish, we are grateful to Andrew Weckenmann, Allie Simmons, Deborah Kopka, and everybody who worked on this book at Routledge for literally making it what it is.
Finally, we both owe a special thanks to Jessica Begon, who, in spite of already having attended the conference, was generous enough to read early drafts of both our chapters and the introduction. It all would have been much worse without her eye for detail.
Carl Fox and Joe Saunders 4/9/18
Introduction1
Carl Fox and Joe Saunders
In this age of calamity, outrage, controversy, and spin, the central question of ethics—how to live well—seems harder to answer than ever. The media, broadly understood, is one of the most important and pervasive institutions in a democratic system of government, and increasing numbers of people feel that it is not helping them or their communities to flourish. On the macro level, we have had to confront the possibility that systematic lying, dissimulation, and hyperbole have poisoned our political discourse and even altered the course of national votes. And on the micro level, we are struggling to understand the implications of the idea that familiar words and phrases, deeply embedded in our vocabularies and often used without a second thought, may entrench oppression and injustice.
This book asks whether our moral, political, and social frameworks for mass communication are fit for purpose. In order to make this daunting enterprise a little more manageable, we shall come at it from a particular angle, namely, what do democratic values require of us in our efforts to communicate, both as private individuals and as a public that aspires to be self-governing? We think that it is vital to ask these questions now because the world is experiencing a moment of realisation about the profound power that speech can have.
To introduce this volume, we wish to briefly discuss three topics and then say something about what the reader can expect to find in the individual chapters. First, and at the risk of becoming instantly irrelevant, we will say a bit more about what we think are the most striking features of the current context and attempt to explain why a discussion of media ethics is especially relevant now. Second, we will consider the idea that speech should be free, asking how that claim might be understood, and identifying the main points of contention that have arisen in the ensuing debate.2 Third, we will sketch a rough account of what we take to be the main values underpinning the ideal of democratic self-government, and how these relate to the media.3
Our goal here is not to prejudge any of the substantive issues that will be discussed in the individual chapters; we are fortunate to have an
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excellent collection of authors and we want to let them speak for themselves. Rather, since we hope that this collection will be of interest to a wide range of readers, this introduction is intended to serve as an entry point that assumes as little knowledge as possible about the concepts explored in the rest of the book.
Current Context
No doubt every time period feels unique from the inside, and we can only guess what future historians will make of the present era. With that said, we think that there are at least three features of the current context that set it apart from anything that has gone before and thus call for closer inspection. They are technological, institutional, and political. We will explain why we think they are important and draw out some of the issues they raise for the project of living in democratic communities populated by genuine political equals.
Technological Context
In The Mandibles, the novelist Lionel Shriver imagines a near future in which people have become so dependent on technology that schools no longer bother teaching children how to physically form letters by hand. We’re not there yet, but the march of technological progress really has been astounding. And it hasn’t just made our methods of communication more efficient (or more legible), in many ways it has changed the nature of our efforts at mass communication too.
Mass production of any product typically requires at least three things: resources, some means by which those resources are transformed, and the requisite skills to operate those means. Each of these things can be more or less costly to acquire or develop. Once upon a time, the task of getting a written article out to a wide audience meant that paper and ink had to be carefully fed into a temperamental printing press. Since few people could afford vast quantities of paper and ink, or to build a printing press, or to pay the printers needed to maintain, repair, and work it, this meant that only certain people could afford to engage in mass communication. Times have changed, and the costs associated with mass communication have plummeted. The written word has been supplemented by video and audio, and they can all be shared with virtually the entire world for the cost of a smartphone and some data. This is not the same as costing no money at all, but the inability to access the internet is now a mark of either extreme isolation or abject poverty. Further, the availability of easy-to-use and high-quality software means that the technical skills required to produce professional-looking results are minimal. Although technology has in this respect opened up the public sphere, it has also unleashed forces that may perversely be narrowing the output
that is presented to us. The limiting factor now is attention, and the proliferation of new sources of news, entertainment, and social interaction means that competition for that particularly scarce resource is fierce. In one sense the pressure to get noticed is old news. We are all familiar with the influence exerted by the tabloid press, whose tried and tested business model is to gin up controversy by running salacious stories and sensational coverage. What is new is the growing mediation of the media as more and more of us get our news through content shared by other users on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This incentivises the production of material that people will want to share. Of course, people will want to share many different kinds of links for many different reasons, but the expressive element to sharing is creating a new dynamic that we are only beginning to understand. In addition, the ability of users to scroll effortlessly through oceans of available content makes it both more difficult and more important to stand out. As the tabloids have demonstrated, pieces that are short, snappy, and dramatic have a distinct edge in these circumstances. We are bestowing enormous power on the new media companies that dominate our online environment, and we are only beginning to wake up to their de facto role as our largest and most influential publishers.
The breakneck speed at which content can be produced and shared also changes the behaviour of the actors about whom stories are written. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a major speech given before he left office, noted that when fighting the 1997 election the Labour Party’s media strategy would be to focus on one issue a day, but by 2005 “we had to have one for the morning, another for the afternoon and by the evening the agenda had already moved on” (Blair 2007, p. 477). This trend is accelerating. Think of your preferred news website. How often does the main story change? We wager that it changes several times over the course of the day.
Blair (2007, p. 477) went on to mourn the effect of having to respond to developments in real time:
In the 1960s the government would sometimes, on a serious issue, have a cabinet lasting two days. It would be laughable to think you could do that now without the heavens falling in before lunch on the first day. Things harden within minutes. I mean, you can’t let speculation stay out there for longer than an instant.
Responding to an insatiable media within such a short timeframe can affect the ability of public actors to make good and considered decisions. Beyond that, though, the knowledge that every public utterance will be recorded, replayed, and dissected at length must have an impact on how public figures comport themselves, and on what they choose to say. The “feral beast” (Blair 2007, p. 479) is always out there, watching
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and waiting. Technological advances in the media have thus created an observer effect. The minute-by-minute coverage of our political process which has become the backdrop to our daily lives is changing that process in far-reaching ways.
Institutional Context
This unprecedented technological upheaval partly explains the struggles of our traditional institutions for mass communication. Possession of a famous logo or masthead no longer guarantees a role as a gatekeeper to a captive audience, or the advertising revenues that used to come with it. Moreover, trust in journalism has cratered. There are many reasons for this. The status of many papers and channels as commercial enterprises (or elements within much larger corporations) raises valid questions about the purpose they serve. What is more fundamental to an editor, informing the public and holding the powerful to account, or growing their parent company’s bottom line? Even if the latter is only one consideration amongst many, it may serve to alter the way in which stories are covered, or the process by which stories are selected for coverage in the first place.
The journalist Nick Davies (2009) stresses that it would be a mistake to idealise the old model of patrician ownership of the press, but goes on to make a strong argument that the new corporate approach is starving journalists of time and resources in order to cut costs and boost profits. Journalists are expected to “churn out” more and more stories with less and less time to check facts or dig for relevant information: “churnalism has swept through newsrooms, forcing the mass of reporters to spend hours recycling second-hand wire copy and PR material without performing the ‘everyday practices’ of their trade” (2009, p. 59).4
Perhaps more significant, though, is the battering that the notion of journalistic objectivity has taken. In one sense, this is probably something that we should welcome. Blind faith in anyone is foolish. All of us have our biases and beliefs, and anyone willing to engage in a profession like journalism that is associated with a sense of public service will likely have views on how society should be organised. Further, as Herman and Chomsky (1988) influentially pointed out, the economic, political, and social contexts in which the mainstream media operates have a filtering effect on the stories and the frames for stories that we are fed. One example of this is the standard journalistic norm of balance. How do you ensure that every segment on the main evening news broadcast is balanced? Editors long ago settled on the structure of a moderator and a debate between two opposing sides. However, we are coming now to appreciate just how inadequate this is when there are many sides to an issue or when the evidence overwhelmingly supports one side, as it does in the case of climate change. The reliance of the media on such things as
advertising, official sources, and existing public beliefs and expectations means that the news we receive reflects much more than just the plain, unvarnished facts.
Journalists, commentators, and media conglomerates cannot be completely disinterested and objective in either their selection of stories, nor in how those stories are presented. However, it is an especially pernicious mistake to think that this means that absolutely everybody has their axe to grind and must be actively pursuing their own ideological agenda, whether we can see it or not. People, and indeed organisations, can try more or less hard to acknowledge and eliminate their biases and prejudices, and be more or less successful in achieving this goal.
This problem is, however, compounded by the behaviour of nakedly ideological media organisations that set their particular political principles as their lodestar, above any pretence of discharging journalistic obligations. For the unwary reader, watcher, or listener, it is tempting to think that this is how all media organisations actually behave, and then to regard claims of serving a higher purpose as rank hypocrisy.
Anyone who believes that the media has a crucial institutional role to play in the functioning of a democratic system, as we do, must be concerned by the emergence of such a febrile atmosphere, because institutions can only function in hospitable conditions. Journalists are traditionally expected to do three things:
1. Inform the public;
2. Represent their interests and convey public opinion to politicians; and 3. Hold powerful individuals to account.
All three require not only adequate time and resourcing, but also a base layer of trust—you cannot inform someone who will not listen. The media faces a profound challenge in winning back the support of the public, a challenge that is compounded by its politicisation in recent times.
Political Context
The elephant making itself at home in our front room is the fact that support for democracy appears to be dwindling. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk (2017, p. 6) report that only 30% of millennials in the United States think it is essential to live in a democracy. In fact, that statistic comes from a European and World Values Survey which shows support for democracy plummeting in younger generations across several established democracies.5 Recent political developments such as Brexit and the rise of authoritarian leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Rodrigo Duterte seem to confirm a shift away from democratic norms of tolerance and inclusion, and a return to jingoistic and exclusionary attitudes.
The causes are myriad, but the financial crisis of 2008 deserves special mention for the enormous de-stabilising effect it has had on our economic and political systems. It has also greatly exacerbated existing concerns about rising inequality and the concentration of wealth and power. We can also point to the effects of war, terrorism, immigration, poverty, climate change, and many more. Another cause, and the one we shall emphasise in this section, is that trust in the media is being undermined for political purposes. In the absence of an authoritative fourth estate, the public sphere becomes less structured and consequently harder to navigate. Demagogues thrive in chaos and confusion because they offer clarity and simplicity. From without, the media has been subjected to increasingly hyperbolic and bellicose attacks, and from within it has been colonised by spurious stories aping its forms and conventions.
A standard rhetorical move for politicians when confronted with a difficult question is to reject the premise of that question. Let’s say that a journalist asks you what you are going to do to fix a failing public service. Simply listing the things that you plan to do can get you into a lot of trouble because it tacitly accepts the idea that the service is indeed failing. If it’s failing, then why is it failing? Whose fault is it that it’s failing? Will someone resign if it isn’t fixed? And so on. By rejecting the premise, politicians can head off uncomfortable follow-up questions and keep the conversation on favourable ground. This tactic is now being deployed on a grand scale. Accusing whole swathes of the media of promulgating fake news and being the “enemies of the people” is an attempt to reject the premise that the media are entitled to ask questions in the first place. There are, of course, some journalists and media organisations that are routinely unfair to particular politicians and political parties, and for that they deserve criticism. We are, however, seeing a move beyond that to a deliberate strategy of delegitimising the media as a whole. This further erodes public trust in the media, making it progressively harder to perform its democratic functions.
It is even harder to believe what you read, hear, or see when you know that there are malicious actors out there trying to slip rumour, speculation, and outright lies through your defences. In simpler times people were generally disposed to believe what they read in the papers or heard on the news, and some of vestiges of that old trust remain. This is why so much fake news is dressed up to look like “real” news. Some of this is the work of “trolls” who delight in making fools of people, but at least some of it appears to have been manufactured by international and domestic actors hoping to spread false beliefs that serve their political interests. We are now on our guard, but raising the drawbridge keeps everyone out—friends and foes alike.
We do not see any easy answers to this predicament. However, this may be an area where philosophers can be of assistance. What people should and should not be allowed to say is a question that has exercised political philosophers for generations.
Free Speech
There are things that not only should we not say, but that we should not be allowed to say. The classic example here is the case of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. If we were to shout that, then the police should arrest us and the courts should convict us. We should go to prison. Similarly, we should not engage in libel or slander, blab state secrets (without a good reason), or incite violence. Very few of us recognise no limits whatsoever to what we can say. However, that still leaves a lot of scope for disagreement about what those limits should be and how they can be justified.
There are two very broad families of views about what the right to free speech is a right to, and which family you plump for has consequences. In particular, it matters for how you view arguments for placing restrictions on speech. We shall refer to these positions as libertarian and deliberative, as they share their core features with, respectively, libertarian theories of freedom and deliberative theories of democracy.
If you are a free-speech libertarian, then you will view freedom of speech and expression in something like the terms used by Robert Nozick (1974). Nozick’s view of rights is that they function as a side constraint on the behaviour of other people towards you. In the case of a right to free speech, people should not interfere with you to prevent you from speaking. Applying Isaiah Berlin’s (1969) famous terminology, freespeech libertarians prioritise negative liberty.6 The freedoms that matter for them are freedoms from interference by various agents—especially the state. Negative liberty theorists do not deny that restrictions can sometimes be justified, but they set a high bar and establish a presumption against interference across the board. We have an interest in being able to perform whatever actions we like, and the only thing that justifies interference to prevent us from doing so is the existence of another right that we would be violating. It is possible on this view to hold that there are many such rights, but free-speech libertarians are also likely to think that there are very few rights like this.
We could thus establish a spectrum with one end recognising no rights that constrain the right to free speech, and the other recognising many such rights. In practice, however, most free-speech libertarians skew towards the less restrictive end of the spectrum and would not recognise, for example, a right to not be the target of hateful speech. It would certainly be difficult to navigate a large set of rights as side constraints as they would likely come into conflict with one another.
Since the ground of libertarian rights is the value of individual liberty, there is a presumption against imposing requirements upon individuals or organisations to engage in or to facilitate certain forms of speech. Free-speech libertarians are generally hostile to laws mandating that television channels and radio stations devote a proportion of their airtime to public service programming, or include a range of opinions in their coverage of political issues.
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If you are less inclined to view speech in this way, then you will probably still think that a limitation requires a reason, but that some restrictions are less serious than others.7 Indeed, you might believe that they can sometimes be an expression and manifestation of freedom. This is what we shall call the deliberative approach to freedom of speech. Deliberative free-speech theorists prioritise the idea of freedom of expression as a civic tool that performs crucial political functions. First, citizens’ ability to deliberate and communicate freely is valued as the best method of scrutinising, testing, and thus perfecting proposed policy. It is the wisdom of many heads. As Jürgen Habermas (1996, p. 359) tells us, this grand discussion provides a “sounding board for problems that must be processed by the political system because they cannot be solved elsewhere”. Second, and more importantly on this view, coercive political authority violates the principle of political equality when some individuals, such as office-holders, bureaucrats, and lobbyists for special interests, have more legislative clout than others. When citizens can contribute in a meaningful way to debates about policy and legislation, this mitigates the problem and buttresses the legitimacy of a state.
Once again, we can identify a spectrum of views. At one extreme, the conditions for political freedom are extremely demanding and require an individual to actively participate in every law that applies to her. The other extreme is much more permissive and allows for delegation of broad responsibilities to representatives and officials. What holds all the views we are calling deliberative together is a commitment to what Berlin (1969) dubbed positive liberty. The key point about deliberative approaches is that the right of free speech is not just viewed as an extension of natural liberty. It is an artificial social construct designed to increase the most important and fulfilling kind of freedom, i.e., the freedom to be self-governing. It is, therefore, not inappropriate to tinker with the legal confines of that right, and related rights, in order to ensure that it really is serving those ends. Further, since rights can only be meaningfully exercised under favourable conditions, these should be provided where possible. Deliberative free-speech theorists will thus advocate for such things as adult literacy campaigns and ready access to a plurality of sources of news and information. If it turns out that public interest programming is particularly good at furnishing citizens with the facts and analysis necessary to make informed contributions, then broadcasters can, and should, be required to provide it.
Further, while the deliberative position can also resent unjustified restriction, hateful speech that undermines the status of specific groups on an arbitrary basis and makes it harder for them to participate as full equals in their political community is especially problematic. This is not to say that deliberative free-speech theorists must hold that racist, sexist, or homophobic speech should be illegal, 8 but the theoretical framework of positive liberty emphasises systemic effects on the possession of a
substantive right rather than the side constraints generated by individual rights, and this means that these concerns are likely to be viewed as more significant.
Rae Langton (1993) draws our attention to one prominent case over which the libertarian and deliberative approaches are likely to clash: pornography. She argues that the widespread trope in pornography of women explicitly refusing sex, while at the same time implicitly inviting it, harms them by promoting norms for sexual encounters in which women are unable to refuse consent because “no” is understood as “yes”.9 While “silencing” could be construed as a violation of a woman’s negative freedom, we would expect to see libertarian free-speech theorists concentrate on the apparently free choices of many in the adult film industry to express themselves in this way, while deliberative theorists would instead focus on the broader social effects of pornography and how they might undermine women’s status as full moral and political equals.
It is worth pointing out that freedom of expression has been traditionally envisaged in, for instance, the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 not as a personal right, but as a civil right that citizens can access to protect themselves against despotic governments. The idea being that so long as citizens can still openly criticise the actions of the state, then they can still rally public opinion as a bulwark against a government that is abusing its power and veering into tyranny. Interestingly, this can cut in favour of either family of views insofar as it suggests both that we should be sceptical of government efforts to curtail the freedom to express oneself, and that participation in vigorous debate and discussion is vital to the functioning of a democracy and so may be not only a right, but also a duty.
Moving on, it is important to distinguish between freedom of speech, the right to be heard, and the right to have access to one’s fellow citizens. Obvious though it may seem, the right to speak is not the right to be heard. However we understand the former, it cannot support the latter. The right to express oneself is not the same thing as being entitled to have other people listen to you. All of this is to say, as many others have pointed out, that not been given a platform is not by itself a violation of free speech.10
However, this does not mean that we shouldn’t listen to people just because they disagree with us. Cass Sunstein (2017) claims that there can be huge social benefits when individuals are exposed to unexpected, and often unwanted, speech by people who share different or opposing views about what matters and why. He argues that what he refers to as the “public forum doctrine” entails that “speakers are allowed to press concerns that might otherwise be ignored by their fellow citizens” (2017, p. 38). For this to be the case, activists, artists, and the humble crank must be allowed to make their points in public places where they have a good chance of being heard.11 As Sunstein (2017, p. 39) puts it, “In
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other words, listeners have a sharply limited power of self-insulation”. Of course, this is a contentious area. And it takes us to another worrying aspect of our current moment, namely that the ideal of free speech is becoming increasingly weaponised. Extreme figures, especially on the far/ alt-right, have been making a lot of hay out the charge that their political opponents are trying to censor them, whether that be on college campuses, national television, or major social media platforms. But it is not only extremists who are weaponising free speech. All across the political spectrum, people are accusing their opponents of not respecting free speech and silencing each other. While the tenor and frequency of these claims might make it look like something radically new is happening, we can see this as an instance of an age-old politic tactic, namely attempting to define the terms of combat by dictating the vocabulary in which debate can be conducted.
We do not pretend to resolve any of these issues here, but we hope that this brief overview will be helpful to uninitiated readers by providing them with a basic set of tools to navigate debates about free speech.
Requirements of Democracy
Since one of the goals of this collection is to better understand the role and scope of a right to free speech by considering it in the context of democratic values and the institutions we require to realise them, it is worth pausing to examine some of the main points of contention and agreement in democratic theory. We will start by contrasting a range of different models of democracy before delving deeper to establish the core values that many of us think only a genuinely democratic system of government can realise.
Models of Democracy
In what follows, we identify three distinct models of democracy, which will serve to illustrate how the various goals of democratic theory can be ordered and pursued. As per usual, a note of caution is required here since these models are not perfectly reproduced in the real world, and the list is not meant to be exhaustive. Still, we believe that it is useful to have some examples of potential options in mind to make the discussion a little bit more concrete.
The first model of democracy is Joseph Schumpeter’s (1966) theory of competing elites. Schumpeter offers two basic premises. He begins with the idea that individual success in a modern market economy necessitates specialisation. To secure a decent job and then move up the ladder in your chosen field you must acquire the relevant knowledge and develop the relevant skills. For instance, to become a good teacher, you need to master the subject(s) that you will teach and the techniques by which
you will hold your students’ interest and encourage them to engage with the lessons. The time and effort expended on specialising precludes most of us from becoming experts in other fields too. The second premise is that governing modern states in all of their sophistication is complicated and difficult. Putting these claims together implies that since most of us have only a very limited amount of time and energy to devote to learning about the nuts and bolts of public policy and the larger questions of political philosophy, we should leave the bulk of political decisionmaking to those people who specialise in it—bureaucrats and politicians. Schumpeter does envisage a role for ordinary citizens, but it is a very restricted one. Citizens perform limited decision-making and legitimating functions by choosing between competing sets of elites at election time. In effect, their job is to decide which general policy platforms they prefer, and then to stay out of the way until the next election.
While acknowledging the complexity of the modern state, Thomas Christiano (1996) recommends a more substantive role for citizens, where it is not just up to a professional political class to decide which options we may choose from. Rather, on Christiano’s view it is pivotal that citizens themselves are the ultimate end-setters in a democratic system. He holds that equal moral status gives rise to a principle of equal consideration of interests, and that only a substantive form of political equality can guarantee this. Although citizens are not required to devote themselves completely to politics, Christiano’s model of democracy does require that they perform two kinds of activity. Citizens must “put pressure on the decision-making process to achieve their aims and deliberate to inform themselves of their interests as well as those of others and deepen their understanding of justice and the common good” (1996, p. 178). The former is achieved by voting to decide the basic aims that the state will pursue, while he views the latter as “the primary concern of citizens” (1996, p. 179). This is compatible with a system of representation in which elected officials are tasked with working out how to realise the ends set for them by the public as sovereign body and to devise acceptable compromises when the ends are in tension.
The final option we will raise here is the idea that democracy should be fully deliberative in the sense that citizens are not reliant on representatives and civil servants, but are themselves heavily involved in the nitty gritty of decision-making. Joshua Cohen argues that we should develop democratic procedures in which citizens will be both formally and substantively equal. They should be formally equal, he thinks, not only in the sense of “one person, one vote”, but at every stage of the deliberative process, such that everyone should be able to “put issues on the agenda, propose solutions, and offer reasons in support of or in criticism of proposals” (2009, p. 24). Substantive equality requires “that the existing distribution of power and resources does not shape their chances to contribute to deliberation, nor does that distribution play an authoritative
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role in that deliberation” (2009, p. 24). Deliberative democracy thus sets the bar very high, but the prize is a far greater degree of control and engagement for each citizen.
Goals of Democracy
Democratic theory is founded on the twin ideals of freedom and equality. It is a matter of some debate whether one of these can, or should, be prioritised. Christiano (1996), for instance, takes the view that the dominant value is equality, whereas the republican tradition explicates freedom precisely in terms of self-government (Pettit 1997). We shall presently explore a few of these ideas, but ultimately we take the view that the success of existing democracies, imperfect though they are, has been to show that freedom and equality can be complementary goals.
We have already discussed the distinction between positive and negative freedom, but it is worth noting that both views can have democratic implications, albeit in different ways. Democracy protects negative liberty by distributing political power amongst the citizenry, enabling them to exercise effective control over the actions of the state. Arming them with such resources as constitutional rights, a system of laws, and, of course, the vote, ensures they are in a good position to reject and resist infringements on liberty.
Advocates of positive freedom value democracy not only because of the way that it distributes what Pettit (1997) calls “anti-power”, but also on account of the opportunity it offers to each citizen to get involved, to exercise autonomy on a political level by participating in the process of government and thus helping to determine the rules of the community. In this way, the law becomes something other than a constraint. Rather than viewing it as a necessary evil, the law is transformed into an extension of will and so an expression of freedom instead of a constraint upon it.
This attitude blurs the distinction between freedom and equality, because exercising positive freedom means taking one’s place as an equal in a community of equals. Political equality is the idea that since there is a sense in which we are all entitled to the same basic respect as moral agents, it follows from this that we are all entitled to have the same say in the collective decisions which will be enforced upon us. This is the principle underlying the slogan “one person, one vote”.
The principle of political equality can be interpreted as a purely formal principle that would be satisfied simply by an equal legal right to vote, but many think that it implies a commitment to more substantive equality. Even in a pared-back Schumpeterian model of democracy, unless individual citizens actually possess the capacities required to make reasoned and informed judgments about the policy platforms that are presented to them at election time, then we might wonder what the value
is of a formal right to vote. The end-setting and fully deliberative models require even more effective capacities since citizens must be able to engage in debate and discussion with each other on an equal footing. As such, the principle of political equality might be thought to require that citizens are supported with a subsidiary set of rights and resources to breathe life into expectations of civic responsibility and intellectual independence. This point is particularly salient for our discussion of the role of freedom of speech and expression in times of great economic and social inequality. As C. B. Macpherson (1973, p. 50) wrote:
As soon as democracy is seen as a kind of society, not merely a mechanism of choosing and authorising governments, the egalitarian principle inherent in democracy requires not only ‘one man, one vote’ but also ‘one man, one equal effective right of individuals to live as fully as they may wish.’
David Estlund (2008) has offered another criterion for evaluating democracy as a system of government. He argues that political authority, which is to say the moral power to issue binding orders and directives, depends crucially on whether the system is sufficiently good at making decisions. So, in addition to having fair procedures for decision-making, we might also ask if democracies need to reliably lead to good decisions about policy. Why might we think that this is actually the case? He offers a deceptively simple answer: “One natural hypothesis about why we actually want people’s views to be taken account of by the process is that we expect people’s views to be intelligent” (2008, p. 6). He goes on to argue that we can approximate an ideal deliberative standpoint by removing or ameliorating the various biases and distractions that cause us to make bad decisions.12 If we think that people are tolerably intelligent and can be motivated by considerations of justice, then the challenge is to design a system of public deliberation that avoids, or controls for, such problems. Estlund thus points us back towards our original question. What should our moral, political, and social frameworks for mass communication look like if they are to contribute to the health of a robust and vibrant democracy?
Chapter Summaries
The book falls into three sections. Part 1 deals primarily with the relationship between the media and democracy. Part 2 tackles questions about free speech and what the media should, and should not, be allowed to say. And Part 3 digs into the thorny issue of bias and ideology in the media. These sections are heavily interrelated in all sorts of ways that we think are really interesting, but if you have a particular interest in one of these areas then they might provide a good starting point.
Part 1: Democracy and the Media
Jennifer Saul begins the collection by considering the use of the term “immigration” in the Brexit campaign. She argues that the shifty nature of this term makes anti-immigrant sentiment especially difficult to combat. In order to remedy this, she introduces the concept of protean dogwhistles. In doing so, she both illuminates important aspects of what led to Brexit, and also furthers our understanding of dogwhistles.
In the second chapter, Julian Baggini examines “The Ethics of Interrogation”. He argues that the antagonistic, dismissive interviewing style which is extremely common in British political broadcasting fails to meet decent ethical standards. He makes the case that it is unfair to the interviewee, unjustly undermines public confidence in civil institutions, fails to elicit the answers that are needed, and merely encourages a form of point-scoring which does nothing to address the most important issues, instead turning the interview into a kind of debating contest.
Joe Saunders explores the political campaigning strategies of Lynton Crosby, and argues that they pose a threat to democracy. In doing so, he looks to shed light on Crosby’s tactics, but also to elucidate exactly what is anti-democratic about them. Saunders argues that there are two worrying aspects to this. The first involves Crosby’s lack of respect for voters’ beliefs, interests and values, whereas the second concerns his propensity for avoiding debate.
In her chapter, Carrie Figdor takes a look at the significance of trust and credibility deficits, noting that it can be risky for us to accept another’s testimony in all sorts of ways. When we consume news, we are not only aiming for true beliefs about the issues of the day, but also to pursue other goals, such as maintaining our social relationships or keeping our communities safe. A divisive political environment, in which it may cost you friends to accept what your political opponents are saying, primes the public to process news in suboptimal ways. While this explains why traditional journalistic norms of balance are often unhelpful, Figdor argues that balance can still be useful in contexts where the risk that comes with accepting an opposing viewpoint is reduced. In particular, careful framing of controversial debates can help to reduce levels of distrust for individuals who are less able to shoulder informational risks, and that, in turn, can improve the situation across the board.
Rob Lawlor and Kevin Macnish consider ethical issues relating to politicians’ privacy. They argue against the standard framing of this topic, which typically weighs politicians’ private interests against the public interest. They defend a different approach, arguing that there are reasons to protect politicians’ privacy, not only for the sake of the politicians themselves, but also for the sake of democracy. These reasons draw on a concern that politicians can become susceptible to manipulation by journalists and editors who have access to incriminating information. If those
with access to the information do not publish immediately, but choose to exert influence by issuing a veiled threat of publication, then politicians’ integrity can be compromised. As a result, some protection of the privacy of politicians may in fact be a requirement of democracy.
Part 2: Free Speech and the Media
Gerald Lang kicks off this section by looking at a Millian defence of free speech. He argues that it is time for a reappraisal of the classic liberal doctrine and worries that it is vulnerable to a number of serious challenges. First, Mill seems to require both that we be free from social influence and subject to it at the same time. Second, unrestricted free speech may lead us towards error, rather than truth. And, finally, unrestricted free speech may serve to increase the social vulnerability of individuals who are already marginalised, thus undermining their dignity and social self-respect. In response, Lang stresses the importance of conventions in shaping environments in which we can successfully engage with one another, and attempts to rehabilitate a Millian approach by developing a liberal theory of free association which permits more specialised communities that may insist on more demanding terms of engagement, just as long as entrance to them satisfies a condition of voluntariness.
The next chapter turns to address the topic of political correctness. Critics often lament how political correctness has “gone mad” and charge that those seeking to impose progressive norms on our everyday discourse are guilty of a pernicious form of censorship. Rob Simpson and Waleed Aly contend that these sorts of concerns are generally misguided, but go on to show how apparently progressive norms have become entwined with new modes of communication that are intensifying the hostility and polarisation of political debate. The upshot is that wellintentioned efforts to reform our political discourse often have a harmful effect and may even be counterproductive, ultimately advantaging parties who oppose the ideals that political correctness norms are supposed to serve. They suggest some ways in which these tensions might be resolved.
Carl Fox’s jumping off point is the release of the Charlie Hebdo “Survivors’ Issue” and its controversial cover. At the time, television news reports bent over backwards to avoid showing the cartoon depiction of the prophet Muhammad. One of the justifications offered for this exercise in self-censorship was that broadcasting an image of the prophet would cause offence to many Muslims. This raises the question of whether and under what circumstances it is appropriate for journalists to cause predictable offence. Fox argues that journalists have a special responsibility to avoid giving predictable offence to reasonable citizens, although this can be set aside if there are overriding reasons that derive from the pivotal functions that journalists perform in representative democracies.
Carl Fox and Joe Saunders
So-called “fake news” stories are a new and dangerous form of disinformation and may have played a significant role in swaying the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Kay Mathiesen asks whether it is morally wrong to censor fake news on the grounds that it would violate the right to freedom of speech. The position she articulates in her chapter is that it is not wrong to censor fake news because it lacks the key features that make valuable types of speech special. It is these features that support the standard arguments in favour of freedom of expression, and since they are not present in fake news, they cannot be successfully used to defend it.
Part 3: Bias, Ideology, and the Media
David Livingstone Smith begins the final section of the book by offering an analysis of what exactly ideology is. He focuses on the function of ideology. Here, he draws a distinction between causal and teleological notions of function, and argues that we should prefer a teleological account. He then goes on to argue that, on this account, the media play an immensely powerful and ethically serious role in both the generation of ideology, but also creating the conditions under which ideologies become causally efficacious.
Lorna Finlayson explores claims of voter stupidity after unwelcome political events, such as Brexit or Trump’s rise. She notes that one prevalent response evident in the established press and on social media is to lament the stupidity of people or to note how easily they are brainwashed (in particular, by the mass media). In this chapter, she considers this in relation to false consciousness. She argues that there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of false consciousness, properly understood—for this idea can help draw our attention to the adverse effects of both ideology and the media. However, she argues that there are also bad ways of invoking of the idea of false consciousness, and that political theorists need to be more attentive to this.
Objective reporting—in which a news outlet strives to provide a neutral and balanced account—was once among the foundational norms of journalism, but the emergence of an alternative and economically successful partisan model has generated a host of questions. Christopher Meyers argues that partisan reporting is, or can be, real news, and that the proper standard for journalism is not objectivity, but a commitment to fulfil the public’s right to know through accurate and comprehensive reporting. However, for this to work, he suggests that we need a news system, comprising a diversity of viewpoints, and engaged news consumers who approach all sources in a critical fashion.
And in the final paper in the collection, Alex Worsnip picks up this same thread. He turns his attention to our own biases, and considers
our obligations in deciding what media we consume. He argues that it is wrong for us to only (or overwhelmingly) consume media that broadly aligns with our political viewpoints, and that we have an obligation to diversify our sources, through consuming media that aligns with political viewpoints other than our own.
Notes
1. We would like to thank Malaika Cunningham and Jessica Begon for reading earlier versions of this introduction, and providing us with helpful comments.
2. As common usage recognises no important distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of expression, we will use the terms interchangeably here.
3. For a broader philosophical approach to media ethics, see Kieran (1997)
4. Davies himself commissioned a survey by researchers at Cardiff University who found that 60% of stories in so-called “quality” daily newspapers in Britain “consisted wholly or mainly of wire copy and/or PR material, and a further 20% contained clear elements of wire copy and/or PR to which more or less other material had been added” (2009, p. 52).
5. Another unsettling trend is the rising number of respondents who think that “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections” is a good way to run a country (Foa and Mounk 2017, p. 7).
6. The negative/positive liberty distinction should come with a health warning: not all philosophers think that this distinction is coherent. See, for instance, MacCullum (1967).
7. For instance, you might think that a restriction on commercial speech is less serious than a restriction on political speech.
8. See, for instance, Corey Brettschneider (2012), who argues that what is required here is state speech to defend the rights and standing of all citizens.
9. “If you are powerful, you sometimes have the ability to silence the speech of the powerless. One way might be to stop the powerless from speaking at all. Gag them, threaten them, condemn them to solitary confinement. But there is another, less dramatic but equally effective, way. Let them speak. Let them say whatever they like to whomever they like, but stop that speech from counting as an action” (Langton 1993, p. 299). For an interesting critical discussion, see Finlayson (2015, pp. 89–110).
10. For a helpful feminist analysis of no-platforming, see O’Keefe (2016). And for a thoughtful discussion of some worries with no-platforming, see BenPorath (2017, pp. 39–46).
11. Sunstein (2017, pp. 34–37) raises an interesting question about what should count as a public place for these purposes. The Supreme Court of the United States recognises streets and parks in this way, but has rejected the idea of expanding it to cover airports, even though you might have a significantly better chance of reaching a wide and diverse audience in a busy airport than a quiet local park. Another natural thought is to wonder if we should conceive of ubiquitous social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in this way, even though they are privately owned.
12. This is something that would need to occur both at the intrapersonal and interpersonal level. And one key element of the latter would involve better representation of oppressed groups.
References
Ben-Porath, S. R. (2017) Free Speech on Campus. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Berlin, I. (1969) Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Blair, T. (2007) Tony Blair’s ‘Media Speech’: The Prime Minister’s Reuters Speech on Public Life. The Political Quarterly, 78 (4), pp. 476–487.
Brettschneider, C. (2012) When the State Speaks, What Should it Say? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Christiano, T. (1996) The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Cohen, J. (2009) Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Davies, N. (2009) Flat Earth News. London: Vintage Books.
Estlund, D. (2008) Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Finlayson, L. (2015) The Political is Political. London: Rowman and Littlefield International.
Foa, R. S. and Mounk, Y. (2017) The Signs of Deconsolidation. Journal of Democracy, 28 (1), pp. 5–15.
Habermas, J. (1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Herman, E. S. and Chomsky, N. (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Kieran, M. (1997) Media Ethics: A Philosophical Approach. London: Praeger.
Langton, R. (1993) Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts. Philosophy & Public Affairs, pp. 293–330.
O’Keefe, T. (2016) Making Feminist Sense of No-Platforming. Feminist Review, 113 (1), pp. 85–92.
MacCullum, G. C. Jr. (1967) Negative and Positive Freedom. The Philosophical Review, 76 (3), pp. 312–334.
Macpherson, C. B. (1973) Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schumpeter, J. (1966) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Unwin University Books.
Sunstein, C. (2017) #Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Part I Democracy and the Media
could we expect of a nation composed of so many national elements?—but that it was so one-sidedly and partisanly colonial. The official, reputable expression of the intellectual class has been that of the English colonial. Certain portions of it have been even more loyalist than the King, more British even than Australia. Other colonial attitudes have been vulgar. The colonialism of the other American stocks was denied a hearing from the start. America might have been made a meeting-ground for the different national attitudes. An intellectual class, cultural colonists of the different European nations, might have threshed out the issues here as they could not be threshed out in Europe. Instead of this, the English colonials in university and press took command at the start, and we became an intellectual Hungary where thought was subject to an effective process of Magyarization. The reputable opinion of the American intellectuals became more and more either what could be read pleasantly in London, or what was written in an earnest effort to put Englishmen straight on their war-aims and war-technique. This Magyarization of thought produced as a counter-reaction a peculiarly offensive and inept German apologetic, and the two partisans divided the field between them. The great masses, the other ethnic groups, were inarticulate. American public opinion was almost as little prepared for war in 1917 as it was in 1914.
The sterile results of such an intellectual policy are inevitable. During the war the American intellectual class has produced almost nothing in the way of original and illuminating interpretation. Veblen’s “Imperial Germany”; Patten’s “Culture and War,” and addresses; Dewey’s “German Philosophy and Politics”; a chapter or two in Weyl’s “American Foreign Policies”;—is there much else of creative value in the intellectual repercussion of the war? It is true that the shock of war put the American intellectual to an unusual strain. He had to sit idle and think as spectator not as actor. There was no government to which he could docilely and loyally tender his mind as did the Oxford professors to justify England in her own eyes. The American’s training was such as to make the fact of war almost incredible. Both in his reading of history and in his lack of economic perspective he was badly prepared for it. He had to explain to himself something which was too colossal for the modern mind,
which outran any language or terms which we had to interpret it in. He had to expand his sympathies to the breaking-point, while pulling the past and present into some sort of interpretative order. The intellectuals in the fighting countries had only to rationalize and justify what their country was already doing. Their task was easy. A neutral, however, had really to search out the truth. Perhaps perspective was too much to ask of any mind. Certainly the older colonials among our college professors let their prejudices at once dictate their thought. They have been comfortable ever since. The war has taught them nothing and will teach them nothing. And they have had the satisfaction, under the rigor of events, of seeing prejudice submerge the intellects of their younger colleagues. And they have lived to see almost their entire class, pacifists and democrats too, join them as apologists for the “gigantic irrelevance” of war.
We have had to watch, therefore, in this country the same process which so shocked us abroad,—the coalescence of the intellectual classes in support of the military programme. In this country, indeed, the socialist intellectuals did not even have the grace of their German brothers and wait for the declaration of war before they broke for cover. And when they declared for war they showed how thin was the intellectual veneer of their socialism. For they called us in terms that might have emanated from any bourgeois journal to defend democracy and civilization, just as if it was not exactly against those very bourgeois democracies and capitalist civilizations that socialists had been fighting for decades. But so subtle is the spiritual chemistry of the “inside” that all this intellectual cohesion— herd-instinct become herd-intellect—which seemed abroad so hysterical and so servile, comes to us here in highly rational terms. We go to war to save the world from subjugation! But the German intellectuals went to war to save their culture from barbarization! And the French went to war to save their beautiful France! And the English to save international honor! And Russia, most altruistic and self-sacrificing of all, to save a small State from destruction! Whence is our miraculous intuition of our moral spotlessness? Whence our confidence that history will not unravel huge economic and imperialist forces upon which our rationalizations float like bubbles?
The Jew often marvels that his race alone should have been chosen as the true people of the cosmic God. Are not our intellectuals equally fatuous when they tell us that our war of all wars is stainless and thrillingly achieving for good?
An intellectual class that was wholly rational would have called insistently for peace and not for war. For months the crying need has been for a negotiated peace, in order to avoid the ruin of a deadlock. Would not the same amount of resolute statesmanship thrown into intervention have secured a peace that would have been a subjugation for neither side? Was the terrific bargaining power of a great neutral ever really used? Our war followed, as all wars follow, a monstrous failure of diplomacy. Shamefacedness should now be our intellectuals’ attitude, because the American play for peace was made so little more than a polite play. The intellectuals have still to explain why, willing as they now are to use force to continue the war to absolute exhaustion, they were not willing to use force to coerce the world to a speedy peace.
Their forward vision is no more convincing than their past rationality. We go to war now to internationalize the world! But surely their League to Enforce Peace is only a palpable apocalyptic myth, like the syndicalists’ myth of the “general strike.” It is not a rational programme so much as a glowing symbol for the purpose of focusing belief, of setting enthusiasm on fire for international order. As far as it does this it has pragmatic value, but as far as it provides a certain radiant mirage of idealism for this war and for a world-order founded on mutual fear, it is dangerous and obnoxious. Idealism should be kept for what is ideal. It is depressing to think that the prospect of a world so strong that none dare challenge it should be the immediate ideal of the American intellectual. If the League is only a makeshift, a coalition into which we enter to restore order, then it is only a description of existing fact, and the idea should be treated as such. But if it is an actually prospective outcome of the settlement, the keystone of American policy, it is neither realizable nor desirable. For the programme of such a League contains no provision for dynamic national growth or for international economic justice. In a world which requires recognition of economic internationalism far
more than of political internationalism, an idea is reactionary which proposes to petrify and federate the nations as political and economic units. Such a scheme for international order is a dubious justification for American policy. And if American policy had been sincere in its belief that our participation would achieve international beatitude, would we not have made our entrance into the war conditional upon a solemn general agreement to respect in the final settlement these principles of international order? Could we have afforded, if our war was to end war by the establishment of a league of honor, to risk the defeat of our vision and our betrayal in the settlement? Yet we are in the war, and no such solemn agreement was made, nor has it even been suggested.
The case of the intellectuals seems, therefore, only very speciously rational. They could have used their energy to force a just peace or at least to devise other means than war for carrying through American policy. They could have used their intellectual energy to ensure that our participation in the war meant the international order which they wish. Intellect was not so used. It was used to lead an apathetic nation into an irresponsible war, without guarantees from those belligerents whose cause we were saving. The American intellectual, therefore, has been rational neither in his hindsight nor his foresight. To explain him we must look beneath the intellectual reasons to the emotional disposition. It is not so much what they thought as how they felt that explains our intellectual class. Allowing for colonial sympathy, there was still the personal shock in a worldwar which outraged all our preconceived notions of the way the world was tending. It reduced to rubbish most of the humanitarian internationalism and democratic nationalism which had been the emotional thread of our intellectuals’ life. We had suddenly to make a new orientation. There were mental conflicts. Our latent colonialism strove with our longing for American unity. Our desire for peace strove with our desire for national responsibility in the world. That first lofty and remote and not altogether unsound feeling of our spiritual isolation from the conflict could not last. There was the itch to be in the great experience which the rest of the world was having. Numbers of intelligent people who had never been stirred by the horrors of capitalistic peace at home were shaken out of their
slumber by the horrors of war in Belgium. Never having felt responsibility for labor wars and oppressed masses and excluded races at home, they had a large fund of idle emotional capital to invest in the oppressed nationalities and ravaged villages of Europe. Hearts that had felt only ugly contempt for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with the struggle for freedom abroad. All this was natural, but it tended to over-emphasize our responsibility. And it threw our thinking out of gear. The task of making our own country detailedly fit for peace was abandoned in favor of a feverish concern for the management of the war, advice to the fighting governments on all matters, military, social and political, and a gradual working up of the conviction that we were ordained as a nation to lead all erring brothers towards the light of liberty and democracy. The failure of the American intellectual class to erect a creative attitude toward the war can be explained by these sterile mental conflicts which the shock to our ideals sent raging through us.
Mental conflicts end either in a new and higher synthesis or adjustment, or else in a reversion to more primitive ideas which have been outgrown but to which we drop when jolted out of our attained position. The war caused in America a recrudescence of nebulous ideals which a younger generation was fast outgrowing because it had passed the wistful stage and was discovering concrete ways of getting them incarnated in actual institutions. The shock of the war threw us back from this pragmatic work into an emotional bath of these old ideals. There was even a somewhat rarefied revival of our primitive Yankee boastfulness, the reversion of senility to that republican childhood when we expected the whole world to copy our republican institutions. We amusingly ignored the fact that it was just that Imperial German régime, to whom we are to teach the art of self-government, which our own Federal structure, with its executive irresponsible in foreign policy and with its absence of parliamentary control, most resembles. And we are missing the exquisite irony of the unaffected homage paid by the American democratic intellectuals to the last and most detested of Britain’s tory premiers as the representative of a “liberal” ally, as well as the irony of the selection of the best hated of America’s bourbon “old guard” as the missionary of American democracy to Russia.
The intellectual state that could produce such things is one where reversion has taken place to more primitive ways of thinking. Simple syllogisms are substituted for analysis, things are known by their labels, our heart’s desire dictates what we shall see. The American intellectual class, having failed to make the higher syntheses, regresses to ideas that can issue in quick, simplified action. Thought becomes any easy rationalization of what is actually going on or what is to happen inevitably to-morrow. It is true that certain groups did rationalize their colonialism and attach the doctrine of the inviolability of British sea-power to the doctrine of a League of Peace. But this agile resolution of the mental conflict did not become a higher synthesis, to be creatively developed. It gradually merged into a justification for our going to war. It petrified into a dogma to be propagated. Criticism flagged and emotional propaganda began. Most of the socialists, the college professors and the practitioners of literature, however, have not even reached this high-water mark of synthesis. Their mental conflicts have been resolved much more simply. War in the interests of democracy! This was almost the sum of their philosophy. The primitive idea to which they regressed became almost insensibly translated into a craving for action. War was seen as the crowning relief of their indecision. At last action, irresponsibility, the end of anxious and torturing attempts to reconcile peace-ideals with the drag of the world towards Hell. An end to the pain of trying to adjust the facts to what they ought to be! Let us consecrate the facts as ideal! Let us join the greased slide towards war! The momentum increased. Hesitations, ironies, consciences, considerations,—all were drowned in the elemental blare of doing something aggressive, colossal. The new-found Sabbath “peacefulness of being at war”! The thankfulness with which so many intellectuals lay down and floated with the current betrays the hesitation and suspense through which they had been. The American university is a brisk and happy place these days. Simple, unquestioning action has superseded the knots of thought. The thinker dances with reality.
With how many of the acceptors of war has it been mostly a dread of intellectual suspense? It is a mistake to suppose that intellectuality necessarily makes for suspended judgments. The intellect craves
certitude. It takes effort to keep it supple and pliable. In a time of danger and disaster we jump desperately for some dogma to cling to. The time comes, if we try to hold out, when our nerves are sick with fatigue, and we seize in a great healing wave of release some doctrine that can be immediately translated into action. Neutrality meant suspense, and so it became the object of loathing to frayed nerves. The vital myth of the League of Peace provides a dogma to jump to. With war the world becomes motor again and speculation is brushed aside like cobwebs. The blessed emotion of self-defense intervenes too, which focused millions in Europe. A few keep up a critical pose after war is begun, but since they usually advise action which is in one-to-one correspondence with what the mass is already doing, their criticism is little more than a rationalization of the common emotional drive.
The results of war on the intellectual class are already apparent. Their thought becomes little more than a description and justification of what is going on. They turn upon any rash one who continues idly to speculate. Once the war is on, the conviction spreads that individual thought is helpless, that the only way one can count is as a cog in the great wheel. There is no good holding back. We are told to dry our unnoticed and ineffective tears and plunge into the great work. Not only is every one forced into line, but the new certitude becomes idealized. It is a noble realism which opposes itself to futile obstruction and the cowardly refusal to face facts. This realistic boast is so loud and sonorous that one wonders whether realism is always a stern and intelligent grappling with realities. May it not be sometimes a mere surrender to the actual, an abdication of the ideal through a sheer fatigue from intellectual suspense? The pacifist is roundly scolded for refusing to face the facts, and for retiring into his own world of sentimental desire. But is the realist, who refuses to challenge or criticize facts, entitled to any more credit than that which comes from following the line of least resistance? The realist thinks he at least can control events by linking himself to the forces that are moving. Perhaps he can. But if it is a question of controlling war, it is difficult to see how the child on the back of a mad elephant is to be any more effective in stopping the beast than is the child who tries to stop him from the ground. The ex-humanitarian, turned realist,
sneers at the snobbish neutrality, colossal conceit, crooked thinking, dazed sensibilities, of those who are still unable to find any balm of consolation for this war. We manufacture consolations here in America while there are probably not a dozen men fighting in Europe who did not long ago give up every reason for their being there except that nobody knew how to get them away.
But the intellectuals whom the crisis has crystallized into an acceptance of war have put themselves into a terrifyingly strategic position. It is only on the craft, in the stream, they say, that one has any chance of controlling the current forces for liberal purposes. If we obstruct, we surrender all power for influence. If we responsibly approve, we then retain our power for guiding. We will be listened to as responsible thinkers, while those who obstructed the coming of war have committed intellectual suicide and shall be cast into outer darkness. Criticism by the ruling powers will only be accepted from those intellectuals who are in sympathy with the general tendency of the war. Well, it is true that they may guide, but if their stream leads to disaster and the frustration of national life, is their guiding any more than a preference whether they shall go over the right-hand or the left-hand side of the precipice? Meanwhile, however, there is comfort on board. Be with us, they call, or be negligible, irrelevant. Dissenters are already excommunicated. Irreconcilable radicals, wringing their hands among the débris, become the most despicable and impotent of men. There seems no choice for the intellectual but to join the mass of acceptance. But again the terrible dilemma arises,—either support what is going on, in which case you count for nothing because you are swallowed in the mass and great incalculable forces bear you on; or remain aloof, passively resistant, in which case you count for nothing because you are outside the machinery of reality.
Is there no place left, then, for the intellectual who cannot yet crystallize, who does not dread suspense, and is not yet drugged with fatigue? The American intellectuals, in their preoccupation with reality, seem to have forgotten that the real enemy is War rather than imperial Germany. There is work to be done to prevent this war of ours from passing into popular mythology as a holy crusade. What
shall we do with leaders who tell us that we go to war in moral spotlessness, or who make “democracy” synonymous with a republican form of government? There is work to be done in still shouting that all the revolutionary by-products will not justify the war, or make war anything else than the most noxious complex of all the evils that afflict men. There must be some to find no consolation whatever, and some to sneer at those who buy the cheap emotion of sacrifice. There must be some irreconcilables left who will not even accept the war with walrus tears. There must be some to call unceasingly for peace, and some to insist that the terms of settlement shall be not only liberal but democratic. There must be some intellectuals who are not willing to use the old discredited counters again and to support a peace which would leave all the old inflammable materials of armament lying about the world. There must still be opposition to any contemplated “liberal” world-order founded on military coalitions. The “irreconcilable” need not be disloyal. He need not even be “impossibilist.” His apathy towards war should take the form of a heightened energy and enthusiasm for the education, the art, the interpretation that make for life in the midst of the world of death. The intellectual who retains his animus against war will push out more boldly than ever to make his case solid against it. The old ideals crumble; new ideals must be forged. His mind will continue to roam widely and ceaselessly. The thing he will fear most is premature crystallization. If the American intellectual class rivets itself to a “liberal” philosophy that perpetuates the old errors, there will then be need for “democrats” whose task will be to divide, confuse, disturb, keep the intellectual waters constantly in motion to prevent any such ice from ever forming.
III BELOW THE BATTLE
(July, 1917)
H is one of those young men who, because his parents happened to mate during a certain ten years of the world’s history, has had now to put his name on a wheel of fate, thereby submitting himself to be drawn into a brief sharp course of military training before being shipped across the sea to kill Germans or be killed by them. He does not like this fate that menaces him, and he dislikes it because he seems to find nothing in the programme marked out for him which touches remotely his aspirations, his impulses, or even his desires. My friend is not a happy young man, but even the unsatisfactory life he is living seems supplemented at no single point by the life of the drill-ground or the camp or the stinking trench. He visualizes the obscenity of the battlefield and turns away in nausea. He thinks of the weary regimentation of young men, and is filled with disgust. His mind has turned sour on war and all that it involves. He is poor material for the military proclamation and the drill-sergeant.
I want to understand this friend of mine, for he seems rather typical of a scattered race of young Americans of to-day. He does not fall easily into the categories of patriot and coward which the papers are making popular. He feels neither patriotism nor fear, only an apathy toward the war, faintly warmed into a smoldering resentment at the men who have clamped down the war-pattern upon him and that vague mass of people and ideas and workaday living around him that he thinks of as his country. Now that resentment has knotted itself into a tortured tangle of what he should do, how he can best be true to his creative self? I should say that his apathy cannot be imputed to cowardly ease. My friend earns about fifteen hundred dollars a year as an architect’s assistant, and he lives alone in a little
room over a fruitshop. He worked his way through college, and he has never known even a leisurely month. There is nothing Phæacian about his life. It is scarcely to save his skin for riotous living that he is reluctant about war. Since he left college he has been trying to find his world. He is often seriously depressed and irritated with himself for not having hewed out a more glorious career for himself. His work is just interesting enough to save it from drudgery, and yet not nearly independent and exacting enough to give him a confident professional sense. Outside his work, life is deprived and limited rather than luxurious. He is fond of music and goes to cheap concerts. He likes radical meetings, but never could get in touch with the agitators. His friends are seeking souls just like himself. He likes midnight talks in cafés and studios, but he is not especially amenable to drink. His heart of course is hungry and turbid, but his two or three love-affairs have not clarified anything for him. He eats three rather poor restaurant meals a day. When he reads, it is philosophy—Nietzsche, James, Bergson—or the novels about youth —Rolland, Nexö, Cannan, Frenssen, Beresford. He has a rather constant mood of futility, though he is in unimpeachable health. There are moments when life seems quite without sense or purpose. He has enough friends, however, to be not quite lonely, and yet they are so various as to leave him always with an ache for some more cohesive, purposeful circle. His contacts with people irritate him without rendering him quite unhopeful. He is always expecting he doesn’t know quite what, and always being frustrated of he doesn’t quite know what would have pleased him. Perhaps he never had a moment of real external or internal ease in his life.
Obviously a creature of low vitality, with neither the broad vision to be stirred by the President’s war-message, nor the red blood to itch for the dummy bayonet-charge. Yet somehow he does not seem exactly weak, and there is a consistency about his attitude which intrigues me. Since he left college eight years ago, he has been through most of the intellectual and emotional fads of the day. He has always cursed himself for being so superficial and unrooted, and he has tried to write a little of the thoughts that stirred him What he got down on paper was, of course, the usual large vague feeling of a new time that all of us feel. With the outbreak of the Great War, most
of his socialist and pacifist theories were knocked flat. The world turned out to be an entirely different place from what he had thought it. Progress and uplift seemed to be indefinitely suspended, though it was a long time before he realized how much he had been corroded by the impact of news and the endless discussions he heard. I think he gradually worked himself into a truly neutral indifference. The reputable people and the comfortable classes who were having all the conventional emotions rather disgusted him. The neurotic fury about self-defense seemed to come from types and classes that he instinctively detested. He was not scared, and somehow he could not get enthusiastic about defending himself with “preparedness” unless he were badly scared. Things got worse. All that he valued seemed frozen until the horrible mess came to a close. He had gone to an unusually intelligent American college, and he had gotten a feeling for a humane civilization that had not left him. The war, it is true, bit away piece by piece every ideal that made this feeling seem plausible. Most of the big men—intellectuals—whom he thought he respected had had so much of their idealism hacked away and got their nerves so frayed that they became at last, in their panic, willing and even eager to adopt the war-technique in aid of their government’s notions of the way to impose democracy on the world.
My poor young friend can best be understood as too naïve and too young to effect this metamorphosis. Older men might mix a marvelous intellectual brew of personal anger, fear, a sense of “dishonor,” fervor for a League of Peace, and set going a machinery that crushed everything intelligent, humane and civilized. My friend was less flexible. War simply did not mix with anything that he had learned to feel was desirable. Something in his mind spewed it out whenever it was suggested as a cure for our grievous American neutrality. As I got all this from our talks, he did not seem weak. He merely had no notion of the patriotism that meant the springing of a nation to arms. He read conscientiously The New Republic’s feast of eloquent idealism, with its appealing harbingers of a cosmically efficacious and well-bred war. He would often say, This is all perfectly convincing; why, then, are we not all convinced? He seemed to understand the argument for American participation. We both stood in awe at the superb intellectual structure that was built
up. But my friend is one of those unfortunate youths whose heart has to apprehend as well as his intellect, and it was his heart that inexorably balked. So he was in no mood to feel the worth of American participation, in spite of the infinite tact and Fabian strategy of the Executive and his intellectualist backers. He felt apart from it all. He had not the imagination to see a healed world-order built out of the rotten materials of armaments, diplomacy and “liberal” statesmanship. And he wasn’t affected by the psychic complex of panic, hatred, rage, class-arrogance and patriotic swagger that was creating in newspaper editors and in the “jeunesse dorée” around us the authentic élan for war.
My friend is thus somehow in the nation but not of the nation. The war has as yet got no conceivable clutch on his soul. He knows that theoretically he is united with a hundred million in purpose, sentiment and deed for an idealistic war to defend democracy and civilization against predatory autocracy. Yet somehow, in spite of all the excitement, nobody has as yet been able to make this real to him. He is healthy, intelligent, idealistic. The irony is that the demand which his country now makes on him is one to which not one single cell or nerve of idealism or desire responds. The cheap and silly blare of martial life leaves him cold. The easy inflation of their will to power which is coming to so many people from their participation in volunteer or government service, or, better still, from their urging others to farm, enlist, invest, retrench, organize,—none of this allures him. His life is uninteresting and unadventurous, but it is not quite dull enough to make this activity or anything he knows about war seem a release into lustier expression. He has ideals but he cannot see their realization through a desperate struggle to the uttermost. He doubts the “saving” of an America which can only be achieved through world-suicide. He wants democracy, but he does not want the kind of democracy we will get by this war enough to pay the suicidal cost of getting it in the way we set about it.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, sweet and becoming is it to die for one’s country. This is the young man who is suddenly asked to die for his country. My friend was much concerned about registration. He felt coercive forces closing in upon him. He did not want to
register for the purposes of being liable to conscription. It would be doing something positive when he felt only apathy. Furthermore, if he was to resist, was it not better to take a stand now than to wait to be drafted? On the other hand, was it not too much of a concession to rebel at a formality? He did not really wish to be a martyr. Going to prison for a year for merely refusing to register was rather a grotesque and futile gesture. He did not see himself as a hero, shedding inspiration by his example to his fellows. He did not care what others did. His objection to prison was not so much fear perhaps as contempt for a silly sacrifice. He could not keep up his pose of complete aliency from the war-enterprise, now that registration was upon him. Better submit stoically, he thought, to the physical pressure, mentally reserving his sense of spiritual aliency from the enterprise into which he was being remorselessly molded. Yet my friend is no arrant prig. He does not pretend to be a “worldpatriot,” or a servant of some higher law than his country’s. Nor does he feel blatantly patriotic. With his groping philosophy of life, patriotism has merely died as a concept of significance for him. It is to him merely the emotion that fills the herd when it imagines itself engaged in massed defense or massed attack. Having no such images, he has no feeling of patriotism. He still feels himself inextricably a part of this blundering, wistful, crass civilization we call America. All he asks is not to be identified with it for warlike ends. He does not feel pro-German. He tells me there is not a drop of any but British blood in his veins. He does not love the Kaiser. He is quite willing to believe that it is the German government and not the German people whom he is asked to fight, although it may be the latter whom he is obliged to kill. But he cannot forget that it is the American government rather than the American people who got up the animus to fight the German government. He does not forget that the American government, having through tragic failure slipped into the war-technique, is now trying to manipulate him into that wartechnique. And my friend’s idea of patria does not include the duty of warlike animus, even when the government decides such animus is necessary to carry out its theories of democracy and the future organization of the world. There are ways in which my friend would probably be willing to die for his country. If his death now meant the
restoration of those ravaged lands and the bringing back of the dead, that would be a cause to die for. But he knows that the dead cannot be brought back or the brotherly currents restored. The work of madness will not be undone. Only a desperate war will be prolonged. Everything seems to him so mad that there is nothing left worth dying for. Pro patria mori, to my friend, means something different from lying gaunt as a conscript on a foreign battlefield, fallen in the last desperate fling of an interminable world-war.
Does this mean that if he is drafted he will refuse to serve? I do not know. It will not be any plea of “conscientious objection” that keeps him back. That phrase to him has already an archaic flavor which implies a ruling norm, a stiff familiar whom he must obey in the matter. It implies that one would be delighted to work up one’s bloodlust for the business, except that this unaccountable conscience, like a godly grandmother, absolutely forbids. In the case of my friend, it will not be any objective “conscience.” It will be something that is woven into his whole modern philosophic feel for life. This is what paralyzes him against taking one step toward the war-machine. If he were merely afraid of death, he would seek some alternative service. But he does not. He remains passive and apathetic, waiting for the knife to fall. There is a growing cynicism in him about the brisk and inept bustle of war-organization. His attitude suggests that if he is worked into war-service, he will have to be coerced every step of the way.
Yet he may not even rebel. He may go silently into the ranks in a mood of cold contempt. His horror of useless sacrifice may make even the bludgeoning of himself seem futile. He may go in the mood of so many young men in the other countries, without enthusiasm, without idealism, without hope and without belief, victims of a tragically blind force behind them. No other government, however, has had to face from the very start quite this appalling skepticism of youth. My friend is significant because all the shafts of panic, patriotism and national honor have been discharged at him without avail. All the seductions of “liberal” idealism leave him cold. He is to be susceptible to nothing but the use of crude, rough, indefeasible violence. Nothing could be more awkward for a “democratic”
President than to be faced with this cold, staring skepticism of youth, in the prosecution of his war. The attitude of my friend suggests that there is a personal and social idealism in America which is out of reach of the most skillful and ardent appeals of the older order, an idealism that cannot be hurt by the taunts of cowardice and slacking or kindled by the slogans of capitalistic democracy. This is the cardinal fact of our war—the non-mobilization of the younger intelligentsia.
What will they do to my friend? If the war goes on they will need him. Pressure will change skepticism into bitterness. That bitterness will well and grow. If the country submissively pours month after month its wealth of life and resources into the work of annihilation, that bitterness will spread out like a stain over the younger American generation. If the enterprise goes on endlessly, the work, so blithely undertaken for the defense of democracy, will have crushed out the only genuinely precious thing in a nation, the hope and ardent idealism of its youth.
IV THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN STRATEGY
(August, 1917)
I the absorbing business of organizing American participation in the war, public opinion seems to be forgetting the logic of that participation. It was for the purpose of realizing certain definite international ideals that the American democracy consented to be led into war. The meeting of aggression seemed to provide the immediate pretext, but the sincere intellectual support of the war came from minds that hoped ardently for an international order that would prevent a recurrence of world-war. Our action they saw as efficacious toward that end. It was almost wholly upon this ground that they justified it and themselves. The strategy which they suggested was very carefully worked out to make our participation count heavily toward the realization of their ideals. Their justification and their strategy alike were inseparably bound up with those ideals. It was implicit in their position that any alteration in the ideals would affect the strategy and would cast suspicion upon their justification. Similarly any alteration in the strategy would make this liberal body of opinion suspicious of the devotion of the Government to those ideals, and would tend to deprive the American democracy of any confident morale it might have had in entering the war. The American case hung upon the continued perfect working partnership of ideals, strategy and morale.
In the eyes of all but the most skeptical radicals, American entrance into the war seemed to be marked by a singularly perfect union of these three factors. The President’s address to Congress on April 2, supported by the December Peace note and the principles of the famous Senate address, gave the Government and American
“liberalism” an apparently unimpeachable case. A nation which had resisted for so long a time the undertow of war, which had remained passive before so many provocations and incitements, needed the clearest assurance of unselfish purpose to carry it through the inevitable chaos and disillusionment of adopting a war-technique. That moment seemed to give this assurance. But it needed not only a clear, but a steady and unwavering assurance. It had to see day by day, in each move of war-policy which the Administration made, an unmistakable step toward the realization of the ideals for which the American people had consented to come into the war American hesitation was overcome only by an apparently persuasive demonstration that priceless values of civilization were at stake. The American people could only be prevented from relapsing into their first hesitation, and so demoralizing the conduct of the war, by the sustained conviction that the Administration and the Allied governments were fighting single-mindedly for the conservation of those values. It is therefore pertinent to ask how this conviction has been sustained and how accurately American strategy has been held to the justifying of our participation in the war. It is pertinent to ask whether the prevailing apathy may not be due to the progressive weakening of the assurance that our war is being in any way decisive in the securing of the values for which we are presumably fighting.
It will not be forgotten that the original logic of American participation hung primarily upon the menace of Germany’s renewed submarine campaign. The case for America’s entrance became presumably irresistible only when the safety of the British Commonwealth and of the Allies and neutrals who use the Atlantic highway was at stake. American liberal opinion had long ago decided that the logic of our moral neutrality had passed. American isolation was discredited as it became increasingly evident how urgent was our duty to participate in the covenant of nations which it was hoped would come out of the settlement. We were bound to contribute our resources and our good-will to this enterprise. Our position made it certain that however we acted we should be the deciding factor But up to February first, 1917, it was still an arguable question in the minds of “liberals” whether we could best make that contribution through throwing in
our lot with the more pacific nations or by continuing a neutrality benevolent toward their better cause. For this benevolent neutrality, however strained, was still endurable, particularly when supplemented by the hope of mediation contained in the “peace without victory” maneuvers and the principles of the Senate speech. This attempt to bring about a negotiated peace, while the United States was still nominally neutral, but able to bring its colossal resources against the side which refused to declare its terms, marked the high-water level of American strategy.
For a negotiated peace, achieved before either side had reached exhaustion and the moral disaster was not irremediable, would have been the most hopeful possible basis for the covenant of nations. And the United States, as the effective agent in such a negotiated peace and as the most powerful neutral, might have assumed undisputed leadership in such a covenant.
The strategy of “peace without victory” failed because of the refusal of Germany to state her terms. The war went on from sheer lack of a common basis upon which to work out a settlement. American strategy then involved the persistent pressure of mediation. The submarine menace, however, suddenly forced the issue. The safety of the seas, the whole Allied cause, seemed suddenly in deadly peril. In the emergency benevolent neutrality collapsed. Liberal opinion could find no other answer to the aggression than war. In the light of the sequel those radicals who advocated a policy of “armed neutrality” seem now to have a better case. For American action obtained momentum from the imminence of the peril. The need was for the immediate guarantee of food and ships to the menaced nations and for the destruction of the attacking submarines. “Armed neutrality” suggested a way of dealing promptly and effectively with the situation. The providing of loans, food, ships, convoys, could ostensibly have taken place without a declaration of war, and without developing the country’s morale or creating a vast military establishment. It was generally believed that time was the decisive factor. The decision for war has therefore meant an inevitable and perhaps fatal course of delay. It was obvious that with our wellknown unpreparedness of administrative technique, the lack of
coördination in industry, and the unreadiness of the people and Congress for coercion, war meant the practical postponement of action for months. In such an emergency that threatened us, our only chance to serve was in concentrating our powers. Until the disorganization inherent in a pacific democracy was remedied, our only hope of effective aid would come from focusing the country’s energies on a ship and food programme, supplemented by a naval programme devised realistically to the direct business at hand. The war could be most promptly ended by convincing the German government that the submarine had no chance of prevailing against the endless American succor which was beginning to raise the siege and clear the seas.
The decision, however, was for war, and for a “thorough” war. This meant the immediate throwing upon the national machinery of far more activity than it could handle. It meant attaching to a food and ship programme a military programme, a loan programme, a censorship programme. All these latter have involved a vast amount of advertising, of agitation, of discussion, and dissension. The country’s energies and attention have been drained away from the simple exigencies of the situation and from the technique of countering the submarine menace and ending the war. Five months have passed since the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare. We have done nothing to overcome the submarine. The food and ship programmes are still unconsolidated. The absorption of Congress and the country in the loan and the conscript army and the censorship has meant just so much less absorption in the vital and urgent technique to provide which we entered the war. The country has been put to work at a vast number of activities which are consonant to the abstract condition of war, but which may have little relation to the particular situation in which this country found itself and to the particular strategy required. The immediate task was to prevent German victory in order to restore the outlines of our strategy toward a negotiated peace. War has been impotent in that immediate task. Paradoxically, therefore, our very participation was a means of weakening our strategy We have not overcome the submarine or freed the Atlantic world. Our entrance has apparently made not a dent in the morale of the German people. The effect of
