Word: truthful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Like many another thinker, Poet John Milton was everlastingly confident that if truth and falsehood were to grapple in free and open encounter, "who ever knew Truth put to the worse?" Last week, 300 years further on in the unending conflict, the question whether truth and falsehood should meet in free and open encounter was still an issue...
...Right to Lie. Hocking would cut the moral props out from under the liars and strengthen the conviction of moral responsibility in the free press: "The right to be in error in the pursuit of truth does not include a moral right to be deliberately in error. . . . Since the claim to the rights of free speech and free press rests on duty of a man to his thought and to his social existence, when this duty is ignored or rejected-as it is rejected when the issuer is a liar, an editorial prostitute whose political judgments can be bought...
Editors will feel an urge to jump on Hocking, especially for his parallels, for truth in politics and morals is no matter of applying a multiplication table. But critics can profit by reading his argument to the end, at least for his insistence on the principle that freedom of the press presupposes a specific acknowledgement of moral responsibility by the press. His argument is a rocky path, but along the way he has strewn some bright pebbles of comment and criticism...
...Much of the propaganda in the contemporary press is simply counter-propaganda, the work of well-meaning men who distort facts because they no longer know how to get a hearing for sober truth...
...Toynbee doesn't. Through the dense matting of symbolism (even the choice of tea cakes, the dropping of a cup, becomes symbolic), readers may extract many meanings or none. Guesses British Critic Cyril Connolly, editor of highbrow Horizon: "And what are these figures, but expressions of a deeper truth, of cycles of spring and winter, youth and age, death and rebirth, of the Mother who must become our enemy if we are to grow...