Since it was thrown out here the other day that Samuel Johnson was alleged to have said, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," I looked it up to see what the context of it was, wondering if it was something more interesting than that. In doing that I found out that formulation is spurious, though Boswell, in Life of Samuel Johnson quoted him as saying the equivalent, it's at the end of this passage.
I told him that our friend Goldsmith had said to me, that he had come too late into the world, for that Pope and other poets had taken up the places in the Temple of Fame; so that, as but a few at any period can possess poetical reputation, a man of genius can now hardly acquire it. JOHNSON. 'That is one of the most sensible things I have ever heard of Goldsmith. It is difficult to get literary fame, and it is every day growing more difficult. Ah, Sir, that should make a man think of securing happiness in another world, which all who try sincerely for it may attain. In comparison of that, how little are all other things! The belief of immortality is impressed upon all men, and all men act under an impression of it, however they may talk, and though, perhaps, they may be scarcely sensible of it.' I said, it appeared to me that some people had not the least notion of immortality; and I mentioned a distinguished gentleman of our acquaintance. JOHNSON. 'Sir, if it were not for the notion of immortality, he would cut a throat to fill his pockets.' When I quoted this to Beauclerk, who knew much more of the gentleman than we did, he said, in his acid manner, 'He would cut a throat to fill his pockets, if it were not for fear of being hanged.'
He was pleased to say, 'If you come to settle here, we will have one day in the week on which we will meet by ourselves. That is the happiest conversation where there is no competition, no vanity, but a calm quiet interchange of sentiments.' In his private register this evening is thus marked, 'Boswell sat with me till night; we had some serious talk.' It also appears from the same record, that after I left him he was occupied in religious duties, in 'giving Francis, his servant, some directions for preparation to communicate; in reviewing his life, and resolving on better conduct.' The humility and piety which he discovers on such occasions, is truely edifying. No saint, however, in the course of his religious warfare, was more sensible of the unhappy failure of pious resolves, than Johnson. He said one day, talking to an acquaintance on this subject, 'Sir Hell is paved with good intentions.'
So it's not especially useful, it's a rather banal point and not original. One of the sources pointing out that the typical form of the statement might date back to Bernard of Clairveaux (1091-1153), as "Hell is full of good intentions or desires."
The way the phrase is typically used is by someone who doesn't like someone else bringing up a proposal to make the law and the government less amorally or immorally depraved or the media or society, etc. Which is, surprisingly to me, far more cynical than the context the often cynical Johnson said it in. I think it's way too seldom pointed out what a large percentage that cynicism made up of that period, especially in those who were held to comprise the "enlightenment".
What's even more obvious than that often used construction is that the road to hell is often facilitated by bad intentions. Why that doesn't get said as a retort, I don't know. Maybe it didn't occur to anyone to go against the great Johnson's authority. Well, maybe that will change now.
Beware of someone piously invoking some famous literary cynic, in easily 9 times out of ten they're doing it for obviously hellish purposes.
No, it's often brought up when people propose nebulous and, truthfully, naïve, solutions to incredibly complex problems.
ReplyDeleteYou often talk about the horrors of the 1st and 2nd Amendments, but have never provided any solution or plan that could reasonably be expected to work.
Yes, it'd be lovely if people didn't abuse free speech to spread hatred, half-truths, lies and slander, but as the Jackson administration showed, passing laws and enforcing them are two different kettles of fish. You have good intentions, but your results would be hellish because you wish to impose your own beliefs and opinions on others and frequently attack any and everyone who doesn't acquiesce.
You want to ban "hate speech," okay, great. Define it. Explain who will police speech. Who will prosecute the offenders? How will sentencing work?
Think the courts are overburdened now? Just imagine when an overtly litigious and entitled culture like ours is infected with laws like that.
Remember, "paved" with good intentions. Not "constructed entirely." Not "no intentions are good." Not, "there are no bad intentions." But "paved," or, lay a foundation for.
Or maybe you do realize and know that much of your imagining will lead to a society that resembles nothing in the Gospels. Jesus didn't care for the Pharisees.
There are different things I think we are finding are essential to protect egalitarian democracy from lies, some apply to individuals and corporate entities, other apply only to corporate entities which don't, by the way, possess rights.
DeleteIndividuals and corporate entities should be civilly liable to a. cease and desist orders if they are lying about someone or some group of people. b. should be liable to financial penalties high enough to discourage them from lying about individuals and groups of people.
Corporate entities, the media, PR firms, ad agencies, etc. should be liable for those things, they should also be liable to having their permission, THEIR PRIVILEGES to operate ended if they engage in serious lying on their own behalf or on behalf of their advertisers and owners. But that should be restricted to electronic media which is proven by the history made of it in the 20th and 21st centuries to destroy democracy, to destroy equality, to get millions of people enslaved, oppressed and murdered.
Yours is the disingenuous sloganeering of lawyers in the hire of the media and who hoped to use media lying to impose unpopular ideologies, in the case of many members of the ACLU, atheism and, in earlier iterations of that gang, Stalinism through the media. It was one of the stupidest pipe dreams of, among others, the trust-fund Stalinist Corliss Lamont who more or less bought out the ACLU when it had fallen on hard times, something he also did with that bunch of academic and intellectual flakes, the "Humanists". In the case of the ACLU they didn't remain under his direct hegemony for long but they did take up the idiotic ideas of free speech absolutism that anyone who wasn't as practiced in denying reality as lawyers can sometimes be would have realized, in the United States would empower our indigenous forms of fascism, the Klan, other right wing groups and that most powerful fascist entity, oligarchic wealth.
The Gospels says, "the truth will make you free," which more than merely implies that lies will put you in bondage. I don't think the Pharisees were who you believed they were, Paul, even after his conversion called himself a Pharisee. If you want to make a case that I'm being overly legalistic, I can point out to you that your ideology is based on an entirely lawyerly, entirely legalistic absolutist literal interpretation of the First and Second amendments (though in the case of the second one, it's a lawyerly lie about what the amendment says) in contradiction to the most dramatic of real life disaster that that legalistic POV takes.
Anyone who would rather face the consequences of NRA style legalism - which is expressed in automatic weapons fire - rather than taking a chance on banning the NRA from lying us into the danger we live in is a total idiot.
All laws can be abused by courts, by judges, by lawyers and by administrators. To allow the free reign to the kind of lying I oppose at it destroys egalitarian democracy and gets scores of thousands of Americans killed by guns every years because you're afraid some Hollywood asshole might get their wrist slapped for talking dirty on TV proves is the ultimate in idiocy. Too much media, too much fiction makes people stupid like that.