CONSCIENCE CAN MAKE FREE MEN OF US ALL

Thank you for honouring me with this most distinctive award, for the opportunity to enjoy your company and to share my thoughts with you.

Your organisation came into being to extend religious freedom to all peoples. And I use the phrase religious freedom in its widest sense, not only as freedom to worship but freedom to put beliefs into practice in everyday life.

Now, I am a mere politician and you may think that politics are about power and influence. But they are about a lot more besides. I am assuming that when you make this award to a politician you do so because you believe that the main theme of her political career has been a philosophy of politics which rests on respect for the individual conscience. That I would certainly endorse. And may I explain what this means to me.

Principles of a Society based on Conscience

It means that the great values on which we stand come not from the State but from a higher authority. Rights and wrongs do not spring from the edicts of a nation state, they come from the teachings of a Faith.

It means that we see society as consisting of individuals with the capacity and the right to make moral choices for themselves.

It means that we see the function of the state as being not to impose some preconceived plan, but to protect the right of its subjects to pursue their own destinies.

It means that while we must have freedom and we must have morality—even [end p1] these are not enough. Because Liberty makes man free to do evil as well as to do good, it can only flourish under the protection of a just, and impartial law. The foremost role of the state in a democracy is to uphold the rule of law.

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” , these are the ends of human society, the ends which government should always serve. These principles supply us with the yardstick by which our progress should be judged.

Is the law clear and equitable?

Does it apply to governors and governed alike?

Are men free from punishment, save when they have been convicted by as thorough and fair a judicial process as is humanly possible?

Are people free to choose the jobs they want, to equip themselves for them, and then to offer their services to their fellow men?

Are people free to worship as they choose, to pursue truth in free argument?

Can it be honestly said that their wishes are properly consulted and respected when the laws by which they are bound are shaped?

These are the questions which we, in the western tradition, ask when we are judging a political regime. They express our political ideals, the goals towards which all human endeavour in politics should be directed.

But you will say that no society on earth conforms exactly to all these rules. Perhaps in this sinful world, no society ever will. Nevertheless, these principles lead me to believe that there are certain things which no state is morally entitled to do, even though its excuse is that it needs to do them in order to prevent the social order from disintegrating into chaos.

I cannot think of any possible justification, for example, for a trumped-up trial designed to convict someone of a crime which he is known not to have committed.

I cannot think of any conceivable justification for persecuting the families [end p2] of those who have fallen foul of the dictates of the state.

I cannot think of any moral justification for putting people into psychiatric asylums for the purpose of spiritually maiming them and mentally battering them into subscribing to beliefs they revile.

These terrible things are practised by regimes which can't exist without defying our fundamental moral imperatives.

The Oneness of Mankind

For us to ignore the cause of conscience would be to deny the oneness of mankind. Human rights are the reflectors of conscience. The test of a Government's sincerity about human rights is not its willingness to use them to further its own political interests, but its willingness to allow them to be used to its own political disadvantage.

Those who fight for human rights from within countries where they are denied have courage of a very special kind. All nations applaud the courage of the soldier in war, but what of the courage of the champion of human rights in time of peace? For him there is no glory, no decorations, no public acclamation by his fellow citizens. For him there is only a seeming eternity of imprisonment, forced labour, physical and mental torture, reprisals against his loved ones—and perhaps worst of all the gnawing fear of being forgotten.

These are the real freedom fighters in the world today. Men and women who deliberately and knowingly have consigned themselves into a living hell: who have sacrificed their limited freedom today so that others may possess a greater freedom tomorrow.

Men and women with bottomless courage, and a burning vision of a better world—whose inspiration is that age-old truth in the Book of Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” . (Ch. 29 v.18)

And so at this time of the 30th Anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, let our message to the real freedom fighters be this:

“We shall remember you, we shall salute you and we shall fight your fight—every year, every month and every day” .

It is easy enough to know what to condemn. It is those philosophies of politics embodied in the institutions of great and powerful states, which deny the intrinsic importance of the individual, which treat him as a mere [end p3] instrument of policy, which are ready to sacrifice him totally to some myth—the myth of “historical inevitability” or the myth of class war or racial destiny; these philosophies we know, and find no difficulty in despising. We see the grotesque cruelties which they breed and the bitter ironies which result from them.

Now to apply our own principles and follow our own consciences in the world in which we find ourselves placed—that is a far more perplexing matter. Our principles themselves confront us with a whole host of moral dilemmas. Just because we believe that we have a choice, we have a great responsibility in exercising it. The path which we have chosen is full of pitfalls. So I want to talk now about some of the dilemmas which afflict the conscience today.

The Dilemmas of Conscience—At Home

There is one obvious and fundamental dilemma. I have talked about freedom and its supreme virtue, but it is plainly not the only virtue. Society must survive. If unlimited rights of self-expression are given to all, the result could be anarchy as each person or group claim their own “rights” , and use their own methods to obtain them.

But you cannot take away freedom from everyone on the grounds that some will abuse it. That is why I said at the beginning that the role of the state is to enforce a just and impartial rule of law—to protect the weak from the strong. On what is that law to be based?

I believe that the acid test is whether you are treating individuals in your legislation as moral beings or as mere instruments.

To this I would add something more. All governments should be sceptical of their ability to make people good by force. They should also be sceptical of the view that they can judge the interests of their subjects better than their subjects can do so themselves. Nowadays, a whole host of measures are promoted in the name of public interest and public benefit. Measures which involve great curtailments of personal freedom. In many cases you will find that those measures really have little to do with the ends to which they are ostensibly directed. [end p4]

They simply rest on the assumption that bureaucrats know best, an assumption which, over and over again, has proved to be false.

They will tell you that life is now so complicated that the public interest has to be decided by some superman at the centre of affairs. But the truth is the very opposite. Life is so complicated today that it cannot be run from one centre; because people, even bureaucrats, are just not clever enough to do it; because they just cannot see what the ultimate, total effect of the infinite number of private decisions and private actions by individuals will be.

Now, in this respect, Providence has been very kind to us. He has not, it is true, ensured that when all men are wholly free to pursue their own interests the total good of humanity will result. That is too much to expect; but He has gone some way in that direction.

Ordinary people, though they are not saints, are ruled in their normal lives by decent instincts. They want good for themselves and for their families and friends. Man is a naturally social animal. He does not go about self-consciously sacrificing himself to humanity, calculating what will be good for all men everywhere, before he decides what to do himself.

But he does respond in his behaviour to a few normal and healthy instincts, such as regard for his own well-being and that of his wife and children and friends; and the great skill of politics is so to use and channel those instincts that they will serve the general good of humanity.

So when people tell me, that there are grave dangers in a competitive economic system which unleashes human greed, I ask them to consider the far greater dangers of a collectivist economic system which stifles all the ordinary expressions of human love and responsibility, which denies people that very choice without which there can be no ethics. [end p5]

You will not get a proper health service or proper housing unless the wealth to sustain these things has been created by private endeavour. That private endeavour will not be forthcoming unless those expected to make it are free to use part of what they produce for their own families and those whom they choose to help.

You cannot make people compassionate by law. You can make certain that your law does not dry up the milk of human kindness.

The Dilemmas of Conscience—Internationally

But there are other dilemmas of an international kind from which the conscience must not flinch. I am often asked why if I believe that individual conscience belongs to all mankind I distinguish between states which deny their citizens fundamental human rights. The answer is not far to seek.

A nation's first duty to freedom is to defend its own. To do this it must see that freedom's greatest enemies do not increase their sway. There are those nations in the world who threaten our liberty and those who don't. There are some who are pledged to extend their own system to as much of the rest of the world as can be forced to receive it. This threat does not come from China or the South American countries or Yugoslavia but from the U.S.S.R.

We should do our cause no good at all if we failed to see things as they are or ignored obvious warnings. So now, as in the past, we have to find allies against common dangers.

There was a time in the last war when we had to ally ourselves with Stalin, and the Greek military dictatorship. Then almost the whole European continent was totalitarian. Now at least half is free and is working for the extension of human rights in the other.

We must always stand for liberty and we must ask other countries to tolerate it within their borders because we see it as part of the larger tolerance which is necessary if peace is to have a firm foundation. [end p6]

Indeed, a world in which the principles of political civilisation count for nothing in so many countries, is a world where peace is in constant danger.

It is, however, a great mistake, indeed a great arrogance, for us to suppose that the particular system of institutions developed in your country and mine can be transplanted instantly and without amendment to every part of the world.

Democracy as we have come to know it in our countries is the culmination of centuries of progress.

It is an even greater mistake to suppose that, in the countries in which this has not happened, we are free, and indeed under a duty, to support any revolutionary movement which claims to be supporting parliamentary democracy and the free society. To begin with, many of those who make this claim are abusing the very words they use. Further, those who would stir up rebellion against regimes which do not perfectly embody western liberties must consider the consequences of what such rebellion would be.

Sometimes politics is a choice between evils, and those who take it upon themselves to promote the destruction of an existing order, however imperfect it may be, must consider what is likely to result from their action.

The choice is often between an existing government moving painfully and slowly towards increasing liberty, and a violent revolution which may well result in the substitution of a regime which extinguishes liberty.

It is this that makes the task of codifying human rights so intensely difficult. Here we have a whole variety of communities at widely different stages of political and social development. Are we to say that every one of these societies must have precisely the same institutions; that the American or the British constitution must be imposed everywhere and at once? It is not possible. Different nations develop their own different expressions. [end p7]

We must judge actions and institutions in their historic contexts. There is no detailed rule book to which we can turn to give a precise answer to every question of this kind; but that is inherent in human challenge and choice. It does not absolve us from judgement, it just makes the task of judging a good deal more difficult.

Conclusion

And so you may well say this to me: “By the time you have written in all these caveats, by the time you have told us what we can do and what we can't, how we must take into account particular circumstances and all the rest—by the time you have said all this have you left us with anything at all?” .

Well, I hope that I have.

I have enumerated the principles which I think should guide us. I have suggested that there are some which must be observed always and everywhere, principles which are moral precepts, not merely desirable goals of human endeavour; and I have indicated that in our foreign policy we should be known to the world as standing for something more than our own survival.

We cannot police the world; it was always an illusion to suppose that we could. We may have to rely upon and make alliances with states which repudiate our own principles; for a wise statesman addresses himself, first and foremost, to the dangers which most immediately threaten him and the ideals and interests which he is guarding.

But in doing all this let us keep faith with our consciences.

Whatever allowances we may have to make for human variety and human error when applying our principles, we can still keep our principles clear. We can refrain from justifying what is unjustifiable; from accepting as true what we know to be untrue; we can avoid putting our seal of approval on what we cannot prevent. “Above all liberties” , wrote Milton, “Give me liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience” . Conscience can make free men of us all.