THERE has been a pretty little quarrel lately—it will probably be forgotten by the time this appears, but no matter—a quarrel between those who write essays and those who have written an essay or two to show that the writing of essays is futile. These last seem to be particularly annoyed by the foison of essays in the present generation. They say it has burst all restraint and is choking us under a flood.
Of old, the essay appeared here and there in some stately weekly paper. Then it dignified once a week some of the more solemn of the daily papers. Then it appeared in another, and another more vulgar. Then, not once a week, but twice a week, in these last: finally, every day. And now (say they) it is everywhere. And the enemies of the essay—or at least of this excess of essay, this spate of essays, this monstrous regiment of essays—are particularly annoyed by the gathering of the same into little books, which they think a further shocking sin against taste. It is bad enough (they say) to drivel away week by week, or even day after day, for your living, but you may be excused (poor devil!), for a living, you must get. What is quite unpardonable is to give this drivel the dignity of covers and to place it upon shelves.
The enemies of the modern essay go on to say that it cannot possibly find sufficient subject-matter for so excessive an output. And so on.
Now here let me break modern convention at once, and say that I am a good witness and in a good position also to plead in the matter. I have written this sort of essay for many weary years. I know the motive, I know the method, I know the weakness, but also all that is to be said for it. And I think that, upon the whole, the modern practice is to be supported.
I certainly do not say that with enthusiasm. It would be better for literature, no doubt, and for the casual reader (who reads a great deal too much), if the output were less. It would certainly be better for the writer if he could afford to restrict that output. But I know that, in the first place, the level remains remarkably high in this country (where there are a dozen such things turned to one in any other), and that it does so remain high is an argument in favour of the medium. For a sufficient standard maintained in any form of writing should be proof that there is material and effort sufficient to that form: that there is a need for that form to supply, and that it is supplied.
These modern essays of ours may be compared to conversation, without which mankind has never been satisfied, which is ever diverse (though continually moving through the same themes), and which finds in the unending multiplicity of the world unending matter for discussion and contemplation. It lacks the chief value of conversation, which is the alternative outlook—the reply. That cannot be helped. But I fancy the reader supplies this somewhat in his own mind, by the movements of appreciation or indignation with which he receives what is put before him. Indeed, sometimes his indignation moves him to provide free copy in protest; though I am afraid that the corresponding pleasure does not get the same chance of expression. I do indeed note, especially in the daily papers nowadays, continual letters from correspondents approving (usually) the more horribly commonplace pronouncements, or those which have been put in to order, as part of some propaganda or other undertaken by the owner of the sheet. These letters I suspect. I believe they are arranged for. But the letters of indignation are certainly are certainly genuine, and editors get a good many more than they print. When such letters are written in disapproval of what I myself have written, I nearly always agree with them.
I can also claim to give evidence as a reader of other people’s essays. For I can read this kind of matter with less disgust than any other in the modern press. Yes, I prefer it even to murders. And I cannot tell you how much I prefer it to ignorant comment upon the affairs of Europe or conventional rubbish upon the domestic: the presentation of little men as great, of falsehood as truth, of imaginaries as realities.
As for the dearth of subject, I see no sign of it at all. If I consider any one man of that half-dozen or so whom I read regularly, my colleagues in this same trade. I can name one except myself who tends to repetition. And there is no reason why a fairly well-read man, still active and enjoying occasional travel, let alone the infinite experience of daily life, should lack a subject. Stuff is infinite. The danger lies not in the drying up of matter but in the fossilization of manner. Nor do I find much trace of that in my contemporaries.
I have, indeed, the contrary fault to find with the English essay-to-day, and that is the restriction of matter. There are whole departments of the highest interest to man which are, by convention, avoided. For instance, until quite lately (when the ice was courageously broken by one group of newspapers) a discussion of the ultimate truths and of whether those truths could be discovered or stated—in other words, a discussion of what is generically called “religion”—was forbidden. Now that the ice has been broken, editors have discovered—a little to their astonishment, I think—that the pioneer was right—that there is nothing for which the public has a stronger appetite than theology.
Another form of restriction is the absence of a devil’s advocate, and that absence is more clearly marked and of worse effect here than abroad. The really unpopular, or the really unusual, point of view cannot get stated in pages of general circulation. And that means the absence of creative friction; for conflict is the mother of all things.
The opposition is, indeed, allowed to appear in small, obscure sheets which are devoted to nothing else. But that is of no great public service. What would be of public service would be eager and general discussion, and the perpetual presentation of argument and fact, which the public are not allowed to have.
Take such a simple point as that of Communism. It is a very living issue in our time. It is an active threat in the French commonwealth, a triumphant one in the Russian; it is a subject of immediate anxiety to every government in Europe, and though it has less place here than in any other industrial country, it does indirectly leaven a wide area of thought even here.
But to get it stated—to have said in its favour all that can be said in its favour—one must turn to small publications which are ignored by the principal newspapers and reviews. In these last you never get the Communist position fully and strongly put. You get it vaguely if violently abused—but without definitions and without concrete details; you feel that it was always there in the background, and you are never allowed to see it.
Let no one flatter himself that opposition can be hear because certain points of view supposedly unpopular are sometimes put in what are called “daring” or “paradoxical” essays. These are never true opposition. They are always a jest or that worst form of demagogic flattery which consists in telling people that what they really think but what they have not hitherto dared to day. Of true opposition in English letters we have to-day none. And English letters are badly worse for the lack of it.
~Hilaire Belloc (1929). Published in One Thing and Another (1955).
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The Monopoly of Information Through the Power to Control the Press and Radio Is Most Dangerous to Society When It Is Used to Boycott Facts.
THE NEXT most important branch of modern monopoly is “monopoly of information.”
As in all other forms of monopoly, there is a wide margin still left. Information is not monopolized in the sense that it can only be obtained from one source; but the tendency to monopoly in it is very marked, and it is increasing under our eyes. The importance of this tendency will escape no one. We can make no judgment on public affairs, and very few judgments on our own private affairs, without adequate general information. If information be withheld, or warped in the interests of those few who control it, the gravest harm is done to the citizen and to the commonwealth.
There are three forms in which this tendency appears: (1) What is called “the air”—it used to be called “the ether”—that is, the wireless; radio, (2) The general journalistic press; and (3) books, with which may be counted the more instructed magazines.
The wireless tends to monopoly in two ways: First, it may be bought up by a few commercial interests which tend, like all forms of capitalist control, to get fewer and more powerful. Secondly, it may be an admitted monopoly of the government.
Of these two the latter is certainly the more dangerous and the worse. In European countries, and particularly in England, the radio is a public monopoly of this kind. It is, of course, mere hypocrisy to say that it is not controlled by the State. It is controlled by a corporation which the State charters, and of which the State appoints the officials. Those who prefer this form of monopoly by wireless are always pointing out the evils of the alternative system, where wireless is free to be bought by anyone who chooses to hire it. They say that this puts too much power into the hands of private capitalist enterprises. It certainly puts power into their hands, but I have never seen that power abused as it is abused by government monopoly. You at least know who has hired the wireless, and may experience of this form of publicity is that, apart from the quite open advertisement, for brief moments of the service or goods furnished by the firm that hires, there is full freedom. But where you have government monopoly of wireless, as in Europe, there is no freedom at all. The mass of men remain, so far as the wireless is concerned, completely ignorant of whatever the government chooses to shut off from them.
The tendency to monopoly in information by newspapers is strong and dangerous, but it may be exaggerated. There are a few cases in which what is called “a newspaper magnate” really controls all the printed daily information available to the public, even in a limited area. Moreover, although the man with a large number of newspapers under one control and distributed over vast areas had much too much power, yet there is a limit to it in another form, which is that people do not necessarily take his advice. The real danger of such men is that “they can suppress truth.” The positive advocacy which they go in for has much less effect; their effective falsehoods are much more falsehoods of silence than of active untruth, and mere boycott or silence can usually be pierced.
There have been a number of instances, as we all know, of a partial monopoly of information breaking down. Your own presidential elections in the United States are a very good example of that, and sp are many movements on our side. To have nearly the whole of the press against one will not necessarily mean that one will fail. But the boycott is another thing. When the few who control the mass of the press over a given large area agree to say nothing about some important matter, it is very difficult indeed to get the matter ventilated. We had a comic example of that over here in England two years ago. The whole available strength of our fleet was sent to the Mediterranean to frighten Italy. Hardly anyone in England heard of that because our press consented to be silent, but all over the rest of the world everybody heard of it, including of course, the Italians, the only people from whom it was desired to keep a secret.
There is yet another force counter-balancing the monopolies of the press; this is what I myself called in many an article and pamphlet “the free press”. A little free weekly journal, with quite small circulation, will often have the power to break down a most formidable ring of silence, or falsehood, and there is also private conversation, passing on the sufficient information received by the few who read the “free press.” Such information spreads out in circles.
We had a very fine example of that half a lifetime ago in one of our innumerable political scandals, called the Marconi scandal. A little newspaper, with a circulation of not more than about three thousand a week, run by Mr. G. Chesterton and myself did the whole of the work of the exposure in the face of complete boycott and silence by all the official press in England. It is true that culprits were not brought to justice; they continued to hold high office and to draw large fortunes out of the taxes, but at any rate they did not save their reputations.
There remains the freedom of the press in the matter of books and the better instructed magazines. This, as yet, is secure over here, and on your side of the Atlantic, of course, it is still more secure. It is not secure under despotisms; but wherever normal conditions of civic freedom exist the book is free. Now the effect of the book is very great. It has not the immediate effect of the monopolist daily press. The effect of the book is long range. But it tells at last. If you want an example of that look at the effect of a book published eighty years ago, which at first hardly anybody read—the book called “Capital” by Karl Marx. It took a lifetime to produce its effect, but at the end of that lifetime it had given birth to international Communism.
It may be asked what other remedy we have against the monopoly of information as it is now exercised through the more widely distributed newspapers. Well, we have, or rather should have if we carry out our proper reforms, the remedy of public demand. A public possessed of well-distributed property will create a demand for information such as free citizens need and insist upon.
Most of the harm that is done by the monopolists of the modern popular press is only done because they appeal to men dependent upon wages, and enslaved by the industrial system. In their lack of security and lack of sufficient freedom they develop an appetite for sensation. They are the less interested in civic business because they are not as much true citizens as their fathers were. For man is not a full citizen unless he is free; and a man is not fully free unless he has economic freedom. And economic freedom you cannot have without property, either individual, or family, or guild.
~Hilaire Belloc: Published in Social Justice, May 16, 1938.
