THE RIGHT TO KNOW

In 1955 Camus spoke at a dinner honoring an exiled president whose newspaper had been shut down by a dictatorship. Camus had been a journalist himself during the French Resistance, editing the underground paper Combat, so he was not speaking in theory. A free press, he granted, can of course be good or bad. But without freedom, he said, it will never be anything but bad.

It is an honest line, because it refuses the easy defense. Camus does not pretend a free press is always wise, fair, or even decent. Plenty of it is shallow, cruel, or false. He concedes the very point his opponents love to make. And then he closes the door on them anyway. Granting all the flaws, a controlled press is worse, necessarily and always, because it has lost the one thing that makes correction possible. A free press can be bad and get better. An unfree press cannot, because no one is permitted to say so.

The principle reaches well past newspapers. It is the case for open speech in general, and for letting yourself hear things you would rather not. We are tempted, in our own small circles, to mute the inconvenient voice, to trim our feeds and our friendships down to the agreeable. It feels like peace. But a world where you only hear what you already approve of is an unfree one, and by Camus’s logic it can only get worse, because nothing is left that can tell you when you are wrong.

Today, deliberately take in one honest view you find uncomfortable, from a person or a source you do not control. Not to be talked out of yourself, but to keep the channel open. The freedom to be corrected is one we surrender more easily than we think.