Censorship wasn’t all bad
Restraints on speech have been abolished, says Daniel Wolf, but we live in a new age of social control We live in a culture that at one moment celebrates stupidity as wisdom, ugliness as beauty, insensitivity as honesty, offence as virtue, yet, in the next, sees dissent from respectable opinion as a cause for suspicion and the expression of uncomfortable ideas as a crime. On 31 January the government was busily trying to ram its Racial and Religious Hatred Bill through the Commons — a measure which is both unnecessary and a dangerous infringement of free speech. It suffered a wellmerited defeat. Meanwhile, all around us, those same hard-won, fragile freedoms are exploited by tabloid witch-hunts, by Celebrity Big Brother and, of course, by the vast bran-tub of masturbatory imagery and random, often incorrect, information that is the internet.
Any assault on freedom today takes place against a background of unprecedented licence. To most, there is no contradiction here. According to our prevailing philosophy of banal romanticism — designed by figures such as Rousseau, Caspar David Friedrich and Blake, and refracted through Jack Kerouac, John Lennon, Hugh Hefner, along with a multitude of others — we should all do what we feel like doing, as long as no one else gets hurt in the process. Of course, quite a lot of people do get hurt but no one is keeping the score. It is an axiom of our age that desire trumps all considerations and, in virtually any newspaper or magazine you open, you can stumble over sentences like, ‘it just felt so right’ or, ‘I had to follow my heart’.
As we anxiously observe the world through the spectacles of a sex-crazed adolescent, our commitment to liberty is vitiated by our terror of truth: in theory we can say what we like but, if we do, we are pilloried by an army of busybodies, seeking to ensure that we do not think the wrong thoughts, say the wrong things, use the wrong language. The general taboo against explicit sexual material, which operated before the 1960s, has been replaced by a more restrictive form of censorship, a haunting fear of causing offence. We may have pornography on demand, but we are more frightened of our own thoughts, and others’ words, than an army of Victorian matrons.
Perhaps that’s what happens when free dom becomes licence. Edmund Burke was on to the problem: ‘Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption.... Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.’ Over the past half-century, the Western world — and increasingly the whole world — has been subjected to an unprecedented experiment in mind manipulation. The internet is only the latest turn of the screw. Modern media bombard us from every angle with powerful images and sounds, emotive pictures, dramatic and frequently unfounded claims. The common defence of this Niagara of inane, sometimes vicious, chatter presents it as both the cost and the benefit of free speech, offered to us for our entertainment in a spirit of democratic egalitarianism. However, we, the audience for this speech, are also shaped by it, in an endless reverberation which works to rob us of our sense of discrimination and judgment, not to mention our time and energies.
It’s the vice of the present to believe that everything is better the way it is. It ain’t necessarily so. Before the rise of modern media, there was censorship, formal and informal, but it did not cripple the intellectual life of the country, as libertarians on both the Left and Right maintain. In the world before the 1960s, what mattered could be easily said, and what couldn’t be said rarely deserved the effort expended to bring it into the light. You may not have wanted to give Lady Chatterley’s Lover to your wife or servant (in the memorable words of Mervyn Griffith-Jones, QC), but only because the book was so dull.
The formal machinery of censorship amounted in practice to occasional interventions by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, the odd D-Notice and the rarely invoked Obscene Publications Act. If you wanted to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Ulysses before the bans were lifted, you did so without risk or great difficulty. The cinema was more thoroughly controlled, but this was due to the industry’s own nervous embrace of self-regulation. The increase in the explicitness of films over the last 40 years has had equivocal benefits: we have gained in verisimilitude but we have lost the power of implication.
Censorship in Britain was not, as some would have it, the ‘ultimate obscenity’. It was a clumsy, ramshackle way of expressing the sense, shared by almost the whole of society, that some experiences were best left to the imagination. It is mere arrogance to insist that because we have learnt to make public what was once thought private, to make explicit what was once implied, to overcome inhibition and abolish illusion, we are, in any useful sense, wiser, stronger, more truthful than our parents and grandparents.
More fundamentally, to think that we have reached new heights of freedom, and therefore perfection, because we have lost a measure of restraint is a classic error. Free speech today, in the absence of censorship, is as thoroughly policed as it ever was in the days before the rise of television and the internet, perhaps more so. As the government exploits public indifference towards the essential principles of a free society, controversial views are classified as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘inappropriate’ by a host of interest groups. Meanwhile the collection of personal information in our wired world promises an age of social control quite unlike anything we have seen before. De Tocqueville’s ‘tyranny of the majority’ (and sometimes of the minority) may triumph more completely, more pervasively than he ever imagined.
The news that Google, the search engine, is collaborating with the Chinese authorities in censoring internet access in their country could stand as a symbol of the superficiality of our belief in open debate. That belief can easily be set aside, it seems, if what is said may offend some important group, whether it is a dictatorial government abroad or a noisy and threatening lobby at home. If we want to take credit for our belief in free speech, it needs to be genuinely free; if we have to bear the cost of Celebrity Big Brother, let’s at least reap the benefit of saying what’s on our minds, rather than slumping in silence, suffocated by our lethargy, timidity and poisonous cynicism.
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