Transcript for Interview with Christopher Kelly on Rousseau's Case for Censorship

0. Introduction

Diversity of opinions is bad, debate is not a sign of health, and rational inquiry destroys communities. These are the conclusions of one of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

My guest Christopher Kelly, a top Rousseau scholar, is going to help us understand how Rousseau possibly arrived at these conclusions.

You should read this interview if you want to know what we’ve overlooked in our culture of total free speech. And the short answer is this: sometimes it is the duty of an author to courageously challenge opinions. But other times it is the duty of an author to self-censor and not interfere with the majority view, even if it’s wrong. Being a responsible citizen means knowing when not to speak the truth.

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Johnathan Bi: When I think of Rousseau, I think of someone whose books were censored and burned. I think of someone who fearlessly spoke the truth, not just about society, but also about himself, which is why I found one of the central theses of your book so interesting. Not only was Rousseau an advocate for censorship, but also some form of self-censorship that authors should know themselves when not to speak the truth. Why is that? 

Christopher Kelly: Rousseau was extraordinarily bold. His acquaintance do. And bear said that Rousseau was the only person he knew who said more than a quarter of what he believed. Being willing to state the truth also means taking responsibility for what you say, which means that there may be circumstances. And in Rousseau's view, certainly were circumstances in which you should be careful about what you say, not simply for self-protection, but for the benefit of other people or for society generally.

Johnathan Bi: I want to double click on what you said about self-censorship being for the benefit of the community. So let me read you a quote from your book:

Morals are the beliefs, customs and ways of life that follow from opinions about what is worthy of respect ... such as respect for the elderly or belief in the sanctity of marriage ... [They] constitute any particular community and give it an identity ... [However,] their ultimate rational grounding is obscure ... Because they are the product of unexamined prejudices, they are particularly vulnerable to the sort of rational scrutiny made by philosophers.

(Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author)

So this might give us a bit more insight on why society needs to be protected from the truth. Because if at the ground morals are these unexamined prejudices, then truth can be harmful to the bedrock of society. Is that it? 

1. Censorship of Morals

Christopher Kelly: It's not so much truth that's the problem, but the investigation of what's true, because the investigation of the truth means calling into question the things that the society believes. These opinions, it might be good to say a word about this term, morals that you use, because this is one of the terms that's impossible to translate from French. The French word morale. Morals doesn't mean a set of moral principles, but it means customs, a way of life of a community, and so on. And that's what's connected with prejudices or unexamined opinions, opinions that people take for granted and agree upon.

Maybe it would help if I gave an example of the English novelist, Trollope. His mother came to the United States from England and moved to Cincinnati where she set up a department store, and it was not very successful. But she went back to England and wrote a very successful book on her experience in America, and she hated America. And one of the things that she hated about it was the way in which her employees in the store and the people she hired to be servants in her house didn't treat her with the proper deference. They treated her as if they were equal to her, and she just thought this was abominable.

So the idea in England was that your servants were beneath you and acknowledged that and treated you that way. That's the mores or customs of England. Now, I would say today if you go to a restaurant, the first thing that happens is the waiter tells you their first name says, "I am such and such, I'm going to be waiting on you." And this is something that a generation ago was not really true. A generation ago it was more like for Mrs. Trollope and her employees. The waiter is someone who is performing a service for you but isn't your servant. And so a sort of formal distance between the two of you expresses that.

Restaurants have decided over the course of my lifetime, that they want to give an informal experience, and therefore the waiter is trained, present yourself as the friend of the person you're waiting on. But of course there's something phony about that because they're not your friend. So we move from the morals of England, and this isn't exactly a moral principle, but it's connected with moral issues of deference of the lower classes to the upper classes, to 19th or 20th century America, in which there's this formal equality where we're equal citizens. No one's better than anyone else, and the employer isn't better than the employee. We're all equals, but we're not friends. To this idea that somehow for the evening we are now friends and informality is part of our democratic morals.

Johnathan Bi: I think it's clear when we look at these morals or customs. They're not grounded to us by reason. Whether we treat our waitresses or waiters as friends or as subordinates, it's through imitation, upbringing, art, media. So I definitely get what Rousseau is saying, that they aren't grounded on reason. But is he saying this even the stronger point that they can't be grounded on reason, that there is no rational right or wrong way to treat your wait staff? Is is he making that stronger point?