WORDS: Graham Foster

It’s no dazzling feat of originality, when sitting in my comfortable chair in my comfortable liberal democracy, to say that freedom of speech is a basic human right. The next statement may also be taken as trite, unoriginal and perhaps a little heavy on the fromage: it’s not just our right, but also our responsibility, to react critically with the world and share our findings in order to stimulate varied conversation and debate. And I should say that writing this doesn’t mean that I think freedom of speech is a beautiful concept that scatters goodwill everywhere. Not at all. With freedom of speech, we all have to take the rough with the smooth. That’s the deal we make if we want our ideas to be heard. By way of example, I’m allowed to express my opinion that, say, Rush Limbaugh is a dangerous, sweaty man who spreads hateful muck every which way from his tawdry little radio show. But then I can’t complain if good old Rush reads that and then calls me a skinny piece of happy-clappy liberal trash whose hippy ideals will destroy the planet, and he says all that live on air (the latter being a rough approximation of a Rushism, I apologize if it reads as a flat caricature). That’s the nature of the beast: it can be ugly.

The above introductory paragraph is by no means an incitement for everybody to run over to their next-door neighbor’s house and read a hastily composed litany of every little thing they do to rub sensitive skin up the wrong way. A world with free speech can still be a world with politeness and compassion (above all else politeness and compassion and humanity). Another example involving Rush L: it’s his politics and his twisted propaganda that I will speak up against (e.g. that whole Michael J Fox thing), but if I met him at a dinner party, it would be impolite to call him ‘Fatty.’ That’s not freedom of speech. That’s just being, well, a dick.

It’s also impolite to use the word ‘dick,’ and I apologize unreservedly for that. The kind of censorship that I think is bad does not really include bleeping of swear words, or pixelating a pair of exposed breasts (again it’s a politeness thing more than a sinister breed of censorship). It’s the censorship of ideas that really challenges the whole freedom of expression thing, and if that idea is undermined by censorship that can only be a bad thing.

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WHAT PROGRESS WE ARE MAKING! IN THE MIDDLE AGES THEY WOULD HAVE BURNED ME. NOW THEY ARE CONTENT WITH BURNING MY BOOKS.
- SIGMUND FREUD

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It’s traditional in an article such as this to write about the Third Reich, and present as the very idea of dangerous conformism and censorship the images of gray-uniformed goose-steppers tossing book after book on giant funeral pyres. The fuel for those literary fires is a list of the great and good: Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann are just a few of the 2,500 authors banned in fascist Germany. Their work was viewed as ‘degenerate,’ mainly because they were Jewish, thus condemning progressive and important works because they didn’t fit in to Hitler’s ideal of Aryan übermensch perfection. The Third Reich is an easy example to grasp – fascism is clearly thought of as a wrong political agenda, and some of the greatest minds of the 20th century were censored (in brutal and sensationalist ways, no less). What this suggests is that censorship could be a major factor in preventing the general intellectual state of the human race and that censorship is really an attempt to change the prevailing political/religious agenda to something that benefits a very specific group of people (while in turn facilitating the intellectual persecution of the rest of the population).

In simple terms, this sort of censorship is a way for governing bodies to be generally unchallenged in their day-to-day policy-making. In even simpler terms, it’s a way for dickish rulers to keep being dickish rulers while preventing anyone from truly finding out how dickish they are being. Think about the medieval bible that was only in Latin, so as to prevent the Anglo-Saxon population of England from really learning about Christianity and to promote the preacher to a position of power.

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NATURE KNOWS NO INDECENCIES; MAN INVENTS THEM.
- MARK TWAIN

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It would be foolish to think that censorship was only the preserve of fascists and less socially developed nations than our own comfortable Western liberal democracies. Both Britain and America have a rich history of banning literary works, one of the most famous being Ulysses by James Joyce. Published in 1922, it became notorious for its depiction of masturbation and other sexual acts, eventually being banned in Britain until 1936. But Ulysses is far from a pornographic and shallow sex book; it’s a complex and difficult book that many regard as one of the best of the Modernist era. Censorship over obscenity is an odd thing, as governments who ban books that are perceived as indecent take on the role of an over-zealous parent, protecting us, the children, from moral harm. Now this is a problematic state of affairs for the free-thinker as it removes choice from the equation. This sort of governmental parenting has been called ‘Militant Morality’ in the past (by Stuart Sherman in his wonderful essay ‘Unprintable’ in The Atlantic circa 1923), a description that fits it like a well-worn soft leather driving glove.

Censorship of obscenity rarely takes into consideration the whole of a text, but merely seeks to ban any text that was perceived as being obscene in part (hence the whole Ulysses denigration thing, it’s by no means obscene all the way through, if at all). By this ruling, other books that deserve a good old banning include the bible, Shakespeare and the unabridged English dictionary (taken from Sherman again – it really is a very astute article, written in a time when this sort of censorship was rife).I understand that it can get quite muddy when talking about obscenity in books, and really each reader must judge a book by themselves to see if it breaches their own personal moral structure (of course freedom of speech would allow this consideration to take place).

It may be easier to use the example of statues. In 1901 there was a raging controversy in America over whether nude statues should be exhibited to the public. The statues under scrutiny were ancient, from Pompeii and Greece, not some tawdry waxworks of Pamela Anderson posed in kidney-revealing pornographic positions. The ‘Militant Moralists’ wanted them banned from exhibition, regardless of their beauty, because they could inspire lewd thoughts in the young. This sort of moralizing doesn’t account for taste – a nipple is a nipple and thus a hideous spectacle in these terms.

In taking away the choice for adults to view items like this (including the books of Joyce or Ginsberg or Nabokov or any of the other censored individuals), it implies that human beings are a savage race that only regard goodness and an ethical existence as important because a government or a church guides us to this point of view. Are these institutions the thin line holding the human race back from fornicating and murdering ourselves into oblivion? Or is it the worst kind of hogwash?

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THERE OUGHT TO BE LIMITS TO FREEDOM.
- GEORGE BUSH

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Most of what I’ve talked about is to do with the cultural world (a world which I think should, at the very least, challenge conventional thinking), but what happens when our day-to-day freedoms are subject to censorship? The above quotation is allegedly Bush’s response to a satirical website (the term Stalinesque jumps to mind), and his administration has been accused of censoring scientific research into global warming (or the results of said research), the effects of his much-criticized war on terror (e.g. the photos of coffins in transit) and was even accused of ‘muzzling’ his own surgeon general when it came to reports on stem cell research. Is this really all that different from Hitler burning books by Jews or the bible only being in Latin? Having secrets for the sake of national security is one thing, but holding back facts in an attempt to push agendas is quite the other. It’s like going to an appliance store to buy a microwave and being given the choice of two, only to be told by the sales assistant that one of them may blow up mid-cycle, destroying half your house. But he won’t tell you which one holds this danger, information that you would really want to know before making that purchase.

It is our responsibility as human beings to be inquisitive, levelheaded individuals and search out the greater truths of this world, ideas that go beyond race, religion or politics. It’s time to become truly progressive as a species and embrace free thought in all its forms. “Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too,” as Voltaire once said. Censorship is the enemy of this progress. So too are the people that let it happen.