Thomas Paine’s radical commitment to free speech: A tradition worth following
Daniel Sharp explores the perennial value of principled thought through the life and writings of the immortal radical
More than once, as he lay dying in the year 1809, Thomas Paine was harassed by the votaries of religion who desired that he repent and disavow his long-held contempt for Christianity. Paine, one of the greatest radicals and international revolutionaries of all time, who almost single-handedly inspired the American colonies to rebel for republican independence with his brilliant pamphlet Common Sense, stood firm and refused to apologise for his deism. (The need of the faithful to importune the desperate and the expiring to recant heresy and infidelity, never mind their strange tendency to invent such recantations when none are forthcoming, is worthy of serious psychological investigation).
Where we have convincing evidence, Paine rebuked each and every one of these macabre interventions. When a pair of devout vultures invaded his room a couple of weeks before his death and told him to repent, he dismissed them curtly and politely: “Let me have none of your popish stuff. Get away with you, good morning, good morning.” A few years before his death, he had rejected another such vulture in good yet biting humour. Some oldster had barged into his room and told him he would be damned if he did not accept Christ. Paine interrupted her: “Pooh, pooh, it is not true. You were not sent with any such impertinent message. Jarvis, make her go away. Pshaw, He would not send such a foolish ugly old woman as you about with His message. Go away. Go back. Shut the door.”
And very near to the end, on June 7, 1809, Paine’s own doctor, James R. Manley, sought to convert the infamous infidel, asking him “Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?” Paine’s reply was eloquent in its simplicity: “I have no wish to believe on that subject.” He died the next morning.
I am interested in the deaths of famous unbelievers, particularly when they furnish examples as noble as Paine’s. Almost every single time, infidels die unrepentant despite the best attempts of the religious to change their minds. As I said, the psychology behind these morbid attempts of the faithful and their habit of making recantations up when they are (and they almost always are) unsuccessful would make for fascinating reading. But I recount Paine’s last days not to make a point against religion (all too fun and easy as that is to do) but to make a point about independent, principled thinking.
Ever since he returned to America from Europe in 1802, Paine had been a figure of both love and hate. He was a respected veteran of the Revolution but he also sided with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party against the Federalists. He had also turned against George Washington in print, was a partisan of the French Revolution, and had written a pamphlet insulting Christianity. All of this inspired extreme obloquy.
Paine was denied the right to vote—in the nation he had midwifed into existence—by some long- and properly forgotten bureaucrats for his political and religious opinions; he was ceaselessly and mercilessly mocked in the press; he was reviled as a filthy, drunken atheist (nothing wrong with that, you might say, and as one such, I would agree) despite being a deist. (This distinction, incidentally, was lost on his enemies, whether genuinely or cynically it is hard to tell; indeed, Paine had written his famous anti-religion treatise, The Age of Reason, in part against what he saw as the depraved, violent atheism/secularism of the French Jacobin revolutionaries. Theodore Roosevelt was neither the first nor the last to stupidly revile Paine as “a filthy little atheist”.)
But Paine was familiar with being despised. Even during the American Revolution, he had faced similar abuse for exposing Silas Deane’s corruption and for arguing in favour of (small-f) federalism, while in France he was nearly executed by the Jacobins for opposing the execution of Louis Capet (he was saved from the guillotine only by a timely accident). He responded as he always had, standing by his convictions and defending them with a literary ferocity nearly unrivalled to this day.
One particularly bold moment came in June 1792, when Paine was in England doing his best to stir up revolution against George III and William Pitt. His Rights of Man in defence of republican democracy had set the nation ablaze with revolutionary and counter-revolutionary passion.
Paine was called to face trial and possibly death for seditious libel. He was followed constantly by government spies. Across the country, mobs symbolically murdered him in effigy. Paine’s response to all this was to send an open letter to Henry Dundas, the Home Secretary, in which he insulted George III as “Madjesty” and signed off “I am, Mr. Dundas, Not your obedient humble servant, But the contrary.”
In America and England and France, then, Paine reacted with scorn to the threats of authority. But he was also well acquainted with the tyranny of the majority, of conformity, and he cared not at all about making an easy life for himself by diluting his views or taming his pen.
In Paine’s last years, his friend Thomas Jefferson was President, and, aside from being denied the vote, he faced almost no persecution from officialdom. The main threat in these years came from the relentless forces of conformity, yet some of his most stirring moments of resistance come from this period of his life: a forceful reminder that interventions from on high are not the sole (and not necessarily the most effective) engine of persecution.
Still, lesser men than Paine might have given up, and much earlier. Why bother being a public figure when you had gone from revolutionary hero to hated radical and infidel? Why put up with it? Why not just retire quietly?
But such is the price of principle. Some great men and women can do nothing but stand where they stand, consequences be damned. Some simply cannot exchange principles for popularity or an easy life. And such are the people that we, in this age of narrow orthodoxies, should strive to emulate.
This doesn’t mean slavishly following the political and religious opinions of such heroes. Nor does it mean that one must never change one’s mind. It just means following their example of steadfastness and fearlessness, despite—even in utter, disdainful spite of—consensus, whatever that consensus may be. Independence of thought is essential, whatever one’s views and the corollary of this is that one must stand up for the right of others, even and especially if their views are antithetical to yours, to think and speak as freely as you.
With what might we compare Paine’s principled unrepentance today? It is hard to know where to begin. Undoubtedly, Paine would have championed the rights of the protestors in China standing up to that particularly evil brand of totalitarianism. Undoubtedly, he would have sided with the women and men of Iran opposing theocratic tyranny. Undoubtedly, he would have not only scoffed at but taken up his blazing pen against all those who, in the modern West, sneer at the right to free speech and consider themselves above such primitive ideals. He would have championed the right of radical feminists to be heard at universities (as well as the rights of transgender people to speak against the religious and reactionary cretins who would deny them).
And then again, and to restate an essential point, it matters not what Paine would have thought regarding particular contemporary arguments, but how his most durable principles can inspire us today. After all, who cares what an obstreperous and long-dead radical pamphleteer may or may not have thought about current issues? The central lesson of Paine’s life, career, and writings, as far as I can see, is this: democracy and free speech and argument above all else, above tyranny and conformity and coercion.
Put this way, it’s no stretch to say that all of the threats to free speech in the world today, whether comparatively trivial (the exclusion and vilification of gender-critical feminists for example) or of world-historical importance (the authoritarian attacks on people fighting for freedom from China to Ukraine to Iran for example), represent differences in degree rather than kind.
Yes, in a world where time and effort are precious resources and in which I am an internationalist and universalist, I shall always champion the rights of the most seriously oppressed first and foremost. But that does not mean I should or shall lose sight of the dangers posed by other forces, including those within the democratic world itself such as the ‘woke’ (a term I dislike but use as a necessary shorthand) or the Trumpists or any other bigoted, liberty-hating faction, who would deny free speech in the name of their own ideologies and interests. Such forces are, albeit in miniature form, just as totalitarian as the despots and dictators and theocrats across the world who so disfigure and disgrace our species.
In short, my point is this: the Paineite principle of freedom and democracy for all is not just a relic of history, not something of merely antique interest, but a living ideal that must be continually fought for against all kinds of threats, foreign and domestic, top-down and bottom-up, apparently trivial and obviously despotic, close to home and far away. This is simply to champion universalism against tribalism and to re-emphasize the seemingly banal but actually very radical point that the fight for human freedom is a fight in which humanity stands or falls together.
I shall end by quoting a section from the opening of Paine’s heretical tract The Age of Reason. These couple of sentences were quite rightly called by Christopher Hitchens, variously, “as pithy a statement of the case for unconditional freedom of expression as has been made since John Milton published his Areopagitica” and, as part of the introduction to The Age of Reason, a central constituent of one of “the classic texts on this matter [of free expression]”. Take it away, Mr Paine:
I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinion upon Religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
One must admire the sheer terseness of this passage. So much said, and with so few words: any scribbler would sell their grandmother to be so correct in so precise and so concise a way. In such elegant and eloquent fashion, Paine expresses the paramount point of this little essay of mine, and I can only finish by once more recommending emulation, not (and regardless) of that old rogue’s opinions on particular matters, but of his enduring principles and ideals.
Perhaps only in doing so can we convincingly lay claim to the inheritance of the Enlightenment and the core of democracy: the freedom of the individual to assert himself against not just all tyrannies and despotisms, but also against, in Orwell’s timeless words, “all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls”—from wherever they may come.
Daniel Sharp is a freelance writer living in Edinburgh and a Free Speech Champion. In addition to editing our second print edition of The New Taboo, he is Editorial Assistant at Areo and is currently writing a book on Christopher Hitchens.
Thomas Paine’s radical commitment to free speech: A tradition worth following
Link to "New Taboo" is broken in : Daniel Sharp is a freelance writer living in Edinburgh and a Free Speech Champion. In addition to editing our second print edition of The New Taboo, he is Editorial Assistant at Areo and is currently writing a book on Christopher Hitchens.