‘Vision of One World’

Garrett Hardin (“Khomeini Discolors Vision of One World,” Op-Ed Page, March 22) argues that a single world state would inevitably destroy freedom of speech anywhere on the planet. He cites as evidence the works by Lawrence and Joyce which were first released in foreign countries because “passionate minorities” prevented home publication. To Hardin, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence against Salman Rushdie is a similar phenomenon, and in a One World state powerful minorities like Khomeini would prevent the worldwide expression of views disagreeable to them because the authors would have “nowhere else to go.”

Hardin’s logic fails on two counts. Khomeini is not a “passionate minority” in Iran; he is the ruler of a theocratic and authoritarian state where his decree is law, and where freedom of speech is not an accepted political norm. And despite the success of passionate minorities in preventing the publication of the works of Lawrence and Joyce in England and Ireland, no less passionate minorities in the United States fail to suppress the expression and publication of ideas offensive to them every day.

Today there are numerous groups in America who yearn to prohibit the dissemination of such works as textbooks on evolution, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and indeed, “The Satanic Verses” itself. They fail not because the creators of these works have somewhere else they can go, but because the value we place on free and open inquiry outweighs the offense any individual idea may render to any particular group’s sensibilities.

Hardin’s argument derives from the tired old claim that a single world state would “inevitably” become a tyranny, and that the continuation of the 500-year-old nation-state system, however successful it may have been, is our only alternative.

The only thing “inevitable” is the continued movement of humankind toward its inevitable destiny of a One World state and a One World human community. Such a One World will not inevitably be a tyranny or a theocracy or inevitably anything else. It will instead be whatever we make of it.

TAD DALEY

Los Angeles