When Roger Scruton arrived in Czechoslovakia in 1979, he found himself helping many teachers “who had been forbidden to teach” and “students who had been forbidden to learn”. He was obviously aware he was travelling to a country which under the cover of “people’s democracy” suppressed people’s views and punished any form of dissent. Still, he was amazed by how palpable the lack of freedom actually felt, and the extent to which it “invaded and poisoned relations between people”.
Scruton gave a lecture on Wittgenstein to a private circle of intellectuals. He was quick to notice, however, that “they were far more interested in the fact that I was visiting at all”, rather than deliberations on the rather impenetrable Austrian thinker. The sense of togetherness was, according to the recollection of a Czech dissident, “the most important morale booster for us”.
It wasn’t just intellectuals who were in peril. The country, Scruton discovered, contained a sophisticated network of secret agents and snitches. Denunciation was prolific and social scrutiny omnipresent. No one, including the most inconsequential citizens, could feel safe from the Big Brother of the state and social pressure of their peers. The Czech author and playwright Václav Havel made this atmosphere famous when describing the deliberations of a greengrocer, who had to place a pro-regime slogan on display in his shop to avoid being denounced or judged unfavourably by his neighbours.
It is 2024, and in many ways the positions of Britain and Czechoslovakia (now Czechia) have reversed. It is now in Prague where freedom of speech and thought is tolerated, and it is in Britain where it is under assault – sometimes on the social level, but increasingly on the legal level as the recent legislation in Scotland shows. True, people seldom go to prison for expressing their opinions – like Havel did in Czechoslovakia – but lives have been destroyed nonetheless. Sackings, cancellations and character assassinations have proliferated in the country that was once hailed as the cradle of liberalism.
“I think it is an irony that those who once helped us cannot help themselves now,” says Luděk Bednář, a doyen of Czech journalism and once a visitor of a Scruton lecture. Back in the 1970s, he was optimistic about the proverbial arc of history, and participated in underground classes with the vision of restoring justice to an unjust world. Yet the ascent of ‘wokeism’ has made him sceptical about the West’s future. Particularly in Britain and the U.S., he believes, a social movement has been launched which it will be impossible to stop. “It is exactly like here in the 1950s,” he says, recalling how Leftist intellectuals happily jumped on the wagon of illiberal Communist ideology. Famous writers Milan Kundera and Pavel Kohout are just two of many examples.
Another former dissident, Zbyněk Petráček, disagrees. In 1977 he signed a declaration called Charter 77 which appealed to the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia to respect human rights. Paradoxically, the Government did all it could to suppress it and led an all-out campaign against its signatories. “I’m deeply worried about some tendencies in the West,” says Petráček. “When the progressives attack Elon Musk for his reactivation of some Twitter accounts, it does smell fishy to anyone who lived in a dictatorial regime. However, I will still claim that the situation in the West is different than it was here. Primarily because you still have people such as Elon Musk who allow you to post on Twitter whatever you want. We didn’t have anyone like that.“
What Petráček describes might be seen as the difference between Orwellian dictatorship and the ‘social tyranny’ described by John Stuart Mill. Mill says that when society “executes its own mandates” – refusing to tolerate some opinions – it can launch an assault “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life”. In other words, it might not be relevant that the American or British Governments generally still uphold freedom of speech under the law. The problem as seen by Mill is the power of public opinion and the way in which perceived heresies – such as ‘all lives matter’ or ‘a trans woman is not a woman’ – can lead to social ostracism.
Historical parallels can only take us so far. It might not be the most important thing whether it was worse to be a free thinker in 1970s Czechoslovakia than it is in 2020s Britain. The bottom line is that the free thinkers of Britain feel increasingly in peril, and although they can – for the time being – publish their opinions on social networks, they still face the danger of being sacked by their employers or having their reputation destroyed by a mob of noisy activists. That, for many, is as daunting as the prospect of being persecuted by the state.
What is needed here is a voice from outside. What Czechs can offer to the British is the extended hand once offered to them by Roger Scruton. There are still places in this world which have not gone astray – and people there still care about the experiences of the persecuted. Also, the Czech experience shows that it sometimes takes a group of freedom loving people, however small, to put their neck on the line. The time for the British has come. What they face now might be best defined as social tyranny but much more ominous threats could be in the making. The case of Scotland has shown the way. It is Roger Scrutons Britain needs now – in the future it might need much more than that.
Štěpán Hobza is opinion columnist at Lidové Noviny.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.