On the subject of burning witches, C. S. Lewis shared an interesting observation. The problem with the anti-witch campaigns of yore was that the witch-hunters were wrong on the facts, not that they were wrong as a moral matter. If there had been people among us possessing occult powers that they used to kill their neighbors or to make them sick, causing the cows to go dry or the crops to fail, then it obviously would be the right thing to treat them as the very worst kind of criminals — as murderers, which is what they would be. The problem is that witches aren’t real — a matter of fact, not a matter of moral judgment.
One of the most important arguments for freedom of mind — the freedom that comprehends freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom of religion, etc. — is that the thought police are very likely to be wrong about things. Whether they are acting in the context of a free society or an unfree one, people who wield political power tend to reflect very strongly the prejudices of their time, their nation, their race, their class, their sex, their religion, their political party, etc. And we do not have to speculate about how things work out when new ideas — or new facts — encounter a political force invested with the power to suppress them: We have many examples in the historical record. Galileo was right and the Inquisition was wrong, but the Inquisition had the power to prohibit Galileo’s books, which might never have seen the light of day if not for the efforts of the heroes who smuggled his manuscripts out of Italy so that they could be published in Amsterdam.
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