Statement on Cultural Freedom
by W. H. Auden
Feast of Saints Victor & Stephanie
Anno Domini 2022, November 11
Cultural Freedom, as I understand the words, is to Culture what Oecumenicity is to Religion.
A genuine cultural oecumenicity cannot be achieved, either by the imposition of the values of one culture upon all the others, nor by boiling them all together into a tasteless soup of generalities.
Differences exist—it is highly desirable, probably, that they should—and honest discourse requires that all parties be frank about them. But true discourse demands certain rules of debate, of which the most essential seem to me to be as follows:
- Differences must be discussed in a dialectical spirit, not an eristic. We must be prepared to believe that our opponents are as concerned with a common truth as ourselves. Debate between parties who regard each other as malevolent or lunatic is not possible.
- We must always remember that the verb “to tolerate” is transitive. Too often we come to a debate prepared to tolerate but with no intention of being tolerated.
- One of the principle purposes of debate is to discover what the parties to it really mean by the words they use. As a general rule, our opponents do not believe what we imagine they believe, and vice versa.
- A Conference on Cultural Freedom or any other topic cannot be organised without public meetings and public speeches. These have, of course, a value in themselves, but their main purpose should be that of bringing a number of individual persons together in the same place at the same time, and so providing them with the physical opportunity for impromptu private discourse.
*Congress for Cultural Freedom News, June 1960
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