FREEDOM AND CENSORSHIP
However corruption may be defined, it involves change. It is obvious that the published word can affect, which is to say change, behaviour : in their different ways the Bible and the Koran, Newton's and Einstein's laws, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf have changed men's beliefs about the world around them and have consequently changed their behaviour. On a more humdrum level, journalism neither would nor could exist unless it were generally believed that writing about the affairs of the day might affect behaviour. It is axiomatic that the press, whether or not it be mightier than the sword, exercises some influential power.
And before anything else is said, it must be stated that freedom of expression is a very important good indeed. The best test between a free ' society and a dictatorial, or totalitarian, or communistic, or fascist society is the degree of freedom of expression which is tolerated. Many would say that freedom of speech itself — the simple freedom to say out aloud whatever a man wishes to say — should be without any legal restraint whatever. Others would argue that such freedom be limited only by the obligation not to cause religious or other offence, and there is a censorious orthodoxy which preaches that to utter words which incite this or that disharmony should be a punishable crime. Blasphemy, the utterance of obscene words or phrases, contempt of Crown or legislature or court, and racial obloquy have all been held to be criminal activities; but generally nowadays the good of freedom of private speech is not much impaired in most ' free ' societies and in many dictatorial ones. There is much to be said for making such freedom absolute : a man should be free to speak his mind even if what he says offends a listener.
The matter becomes more complex when what a man says is published, whether in print, or broadcasted, or spoken from a public platform. Laws of libel are more stringent than laws of slander. Obscene, blasphemous or violent language which is commonplace in private use may cause public offence and public concern and be publicly regulated when used publicly. The framers, and the majority of the judicial interpreters, of the American constitution have taken the view that the good of the freedom of the press outweighs the bad, and that in the long run society is better preserved or less corrupted by licence than by censorship. In this country, bereft of any written constitution or of any entrenched Bill of Rights, we have been inclined to take comfort in the supposed freedom and responsibility of the press while restraining the general freedom of expression so that nothing much is written, said or done which would outrage the respectable or cause affront to the genteel. A compromise has been achieved whereby it has been comfortably believed that the Dress in the exercise of its liberty has restrained itself from becoming licentious, and that thereby the evil of excessive censorship has been avoided.
This uneasy compromise has now broken down. Something like a total freedom of expression is claimed, and in part exercised, in publications and in public performances. In their different ways. sex films, the Oz trial and Lord Longford's private commission on public pornography illustrate all too well the nature and the extent of the breakdown of which they are themselves symptoms. Continually, now, and usually for sound commercial reasons, journalism and show busi. ness and book publishing and radio and television broadcasting seek to extend the area of the permissible and to restrict the area that is forbidden — and although new prohibitions to do largely with race and colour have arisen, often advocated by those who otherwise wish to allow everything else (` nigger ' is now a more offensive word than 'bugger '), the general drift has been towards a situation where anything goes.
Should efforts be made to halt this drift? The answer which leaps readily to mind is, Yes.' Confronted with the objec tionable nature of much that is published and publicly per formed, not only prudes but reasonable men and women will say that these things are corrupting and should be stopped.
There is no reason to suppose that adults and adolescents and children who are constantly exposed to sexual titillation of one kind or another (and who provide a ready, large, and growing market) are not to some extent affected by what they choose and pay to read or see. But is the change in behaviour a corrupting change? There is very little evidence that it is. There are those who argue that because something is obscene or offensive in itself it ought to be banned, whether or not it corrupts; but it is very difficult for the law to take a stand on matters which essentially are those of taste and are subject to fashion. The reverse argument, more frequently used, that what may be obscene or offensive in itself may nevertheless be permissible or desirable in its context — that art (or religion, or politics) may justify the otherwise unjustifiable — again requires judgements to be made which courts of law are neither suited nor designed to make. The ten dency of the law to make the test not that of taste but of corruptiveness has had the effect of increasing the permis sible without removing the confusion. Judge Argyle in his reasoned summing up of the Oz trial said, on what is obscene, "One definition shades into another, and it is impossible for a court to show where the guiding line is ", while proceeding to remind the jury that the prosecution had to prove that the magazine was obscene and'that it would be likely to deprave' and corrupt a significant proportion of the public who were likely to read it. The irony is that a jury of average people, if they were dealing with a publication likely to be read by a significant proportion of average people, can with honesty only declare a publication to be depraving and corrupting if they themselves have been depraved and corrupted as a consequence of their jury service.
It may be that descriptions or performances or representations of sexual behaviour do in some cases both deprave and corrupt their readers or witnesses, or indeed, their publishers, authors and performers; but if the consequential depravity and corruption is small and incapable of proof, then it might be better not to seek to constrain such publications and per formances by law at all. There is much that is offensive to many people which the law takes no account of. A manual on the manufacture and use of small arms or bombs, or gases, or drugs may well be far more depraving or corrupting than any manual of sexual techniques. The practices of govern ments and police forces and armies may be far more depraving and corrupting than any conceivable orgiastic description or performance. Those who argue that the real obscenities are the public violence of states may well be on far firmer ground than those who seek, from the most honourable motives, to halt the general drift towards an almost unconstrained freedom of expression.
The freedom of expression, which incorporates the freedoms of speech, and of the press, and of the arts, is best un constrained by law, except insofar as the law protects the privacy and the repute of individuals and the welfare of those regarded by society as infants. The vestiges of censorship should be removed : for they are no longer effective, and the corruptiveness of that from which censorship is designed to protect society is not establishable. The right of any man to express himself as he wishes should not be constrained unless he interferes with his neighbour's right not to listen or to look.
Previous page
