Johann Hari

The British people find it hard to cherish their philosophers. In France, the recent centenary of Jean-Paul Sartre was virtually a state event, with newspaper pull-outs bearing his toad-face and endless adulations. In the United States – a country we like to jeer at as ignorant – most people at least learn some lines of Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s at school. But here, the bicentenary of the birth of perhaps our greatest philosopher – John Stuart Mill – is passing in the night.

This is tragic, because Mill is our contemporary and our guide in a way that is true of very few philosophers. If you read his Collected Works after reading the day’s newspapers, it is as if he is an unimaginably brilliant columnist, commenting on yesterday, today and tomorrow. He speaks to almost every issue. Last week, after reading the front pages of right wing newspapers shrieking in horror at the renewed distribution of contraceptives to teenagers, I read Mill’s account of his spell in jail for distributing leaflets about contraception to teenagers. Over the past year, as debates have blistered across parliament about how best to circumscribe and stunt free speech, I kept returning to Mill’s ‘On Liberty’, the greatest defence of free speech we have.

And on his relevance goes: some of the bravest and smartest Muslim women in the world like Fadela Amara and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have been begging their sisters to read Mill’s book ‘On the Subjection of Women’ – the first great call for gender equality – as a solution to the community’s worst problems. Economists arguing about the best way to redistribute wealth to the poor turn to his writings. His works together represent a clarion Liberal Manifesto, and it has endured far better than the Communist Manifesto or the nationalist screeds written at the same time. Mill’s fights are our fights. Mill’s words should be our words.

It is almost impossible to summarise his ideas and their urgency is so short a space, but at their core they boil down to two concepts: utilitarianism and liberty. In a world where people passively followed moral rules they believed had been handed down by God, Mill picked up and developed utilitarianism as an alternative – a philosophy as blazingly radical as it was easy to understand. The only way to measure the morality of an action, he says, is not to refer to ‘natural’ rules, much less ‘God’, but to ask if it increases the overall happiness of human beings: “Actions are right in proportion as they tend to produce happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” The overall promotion of happiness and the minimising of suffering are “the sole basis of morality.” It was radically egalitarian – everybody’s happiness is equal – and a radical affront to a world organised for the happiness of a few wealthy people.

But he did not stop there. He went on to argue that the best way to maximise human happiness is to maximise human freedom. We must “give full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.” There is no single form of Happiness for us to discover; it is only by allowing innumerable “experiments in living” that people will find their own personal slivers of happiness. We must never ban each other from acting and speaking as we wish, unless we can show that clear, immediate and considerable harm to other people arises from it. Mill serves up a philosophy that provides the best of the collective – the focus of concern is humanity – while preserving the sovereignty of the individual.

If we were to act on the broad contours of Mill’s philosophy today, the world would look very different. Let’s look first at economics. Currently, our society (and the planet) is structured and geared almost exclusively to maximise the Gross National Product. The bottom line runs like a thread through everything. But recently the brilliant utilitarian economist Richard Layard – with one eye on Mill – asked a challenging question: what if we tried to maximise the Gross National Happiness instead?

Layard’s starting point was a stark statistic: even though Britain has doubled its national wealth since the 1950s, the evidence shows that we, the British people, are not any happier. The evidence shows that once absolute poverty – hunger and thirst and cold – have been overcome, economic growth has diminishing returns. If you are concerned about human happiness, then you have to take into account relative inequality. Like monkeys, humans are status-seeking primates: our happiness comes from knowing we are respected among our peers. So where there are chasms of inequality – where the rich are so far beyond us that we feel inescapably low-status – we become more miserable. We become less able to trust our neighbours, less secure, and lower status compared to the ever-more-distant rich. That’s why our doubled wealth has not made us happier.

Mill not only understood this problem; he foresaw the solution. He called for on-going redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, experiments in profit-sharing co-operatives, and hefty inheritance tax to prevent the development of a class of “the undeserving rich”. This will surprise many people today who claim to be liberals and speak in Mill’s name. I think of them as glibertarians, the people who think the only way to increase liberty and happiness is to cripple the state, reducing it to a flaccid bystander. For them, every tax cut is an advance in freedom. This was not Mill’s view. He saw that true liberty comes from the ability to actually be able to afford a decent life. He knew that the amazing ability of markets to generate wealth was an essential tool for achieving happiness – he rightly predicted that revolutionary socialism would be “a tyrannical disaster” – but he also knew that they had to be matched by an active state or they would in turn hinder human happiness in countless ways.

The utilitarian benefits of redistributing wealth – and the limits of this policy – were investigated by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartaya Sen and his colleagues in the 1960s. They started from the premise that giving a pound to a poor person creates more happiness than giving a pound to a rich person. (Give a Big Issue seller fifty quid and he’ll be ecstatic; give it to Rupert Murdoch and his smile will not lift even a fraction). Layard explains how their research developed from there: “So we should tax the rich for the benefit of the poor. But as we do this, we blunt the incentives facing both rich and poor. Thus, as we raise the tax rate, the total size of the cake falls. So we should stop raising the tax rate before we reach full equality. The optimum is where the gains from further redistribution are just outweighed by the losses from the shrinking of the cake.” This is an empirical question, and a serious application of Mill’s philosophy would try to discover it and put it into practice. It would transform our economic perspective by treating the pounds of the rich and the pounds of the poor as being of different value because they create different amounts of happiness.

But it is not only our economics that Mill would reshape; it is our politics. We live in a time and in a country where the most basic freedom of all – to speak your mind – is being eroded. In the past year, a religious mob has closed down a play – written by a member of their own faith – and government ministers have rallied to the defence of the mob. A woman has been criminalized for reading out the names of the soldiers killed in Iraq outside Downing Street. Only the unelected Lords saved us from a monstrous ban on “inciting hatred of religion” that would make the proselytising atheist Mill legally suspect.

Mill said that silencing an opinion “robs the human race”, because “if the opinion is right, we are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, we lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” False opinions – even grossly false ones, like Holocaust denial or creationism – have a valuable function, because “he who only knows his own side of the case know little of that.” Yet there are revivified religious movements calling for just that, most recently with the demands from Islamic fundamentalists – backed even by some ‘liberals’ – that images mocking Mohammed by criminalized.

There is a new mood in Britain that encouraging conflict – “disharmony,” as Jack Straw put it in his defence of the pro-censorship mob – is somehow bad. Mill showed that conflict is in fact the very basis of progress, the only way to prevent a culture from ossifying into a fossil. Moreover, offence to religion is not a regrettable lapse we must allow: it is a positive good. One of the main reasons Christianity has lost its power to oppress and terrorise people in this country is because it has been so thoroughly poached and pilloried by comedians; who can hear the Christ story now without also hearing the line, “He’s not the Messiah – he’s a very naughty boy”? Islam will only lose its own terrible sting – applied mostly to Muslim women and gays – if it too is mocked mercilessly, including, yes, Mohammed. Moderate Muslims are keenly aware of this: the real insult to them would be for us to water down basic Enlightenment values on their behalf, as if they were irrationalist aliens rather than the fellow citizens of a democracy. That’s why the most eloquent speakers at this weekend’s rally for free speech in Trafalgar Square were Muslims, and why they received the biggest cheers. The best thing we can do for Muslims – as they battle between liberal and literalist wings – is to keep open the channels of dissent, in the hope that these heroic liberals will prevail.

Of course, Mill had some terrible flaws too. His liberalism was contaminated by the racism of Victorian culture. As an official in the East India Company, he defended the corporate rape and plunder of India – the creation of holocausts that killed as many as 29 million Indians – as “for their own good”. His theories on logic have been similarly discredited.

But if a 200 year-old John Stuart Mill could see the country of his birth today, he would tell us – for starters – to redistribute wealth to the poor, to worry more about happiness than about acquiring ever-greater baubles of wealth, and to protect our free speech against all comers. As he lay dying, Mill muttered, “I have done my work.” If only, John, if only.

RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING: By far the best things to read about Mill are his own works, which Nietzsche attacked for their “offensive clarity” – surely a good sign. Oxford World’s Classics publishes a cheap, excellent collection called ‘On Liberty and Other Essays’. His Autobiography is also brilliant.

I’d also recommend the forthcoming book published next month by Routledge, ‘Why Read Mill Today?’ by John Skorupski, and Susan Leigh Anderson’s book ‘On Mill’.

For interesting developments and riffs on his ideas, check out Richard Layard's 'Happiness - Lessons from the New Science' and 'The Caged Virgin' by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Also, comments on this article for publication in the Indie can be sent to letters@independent.co.uk