it is responsible in no small measure. Some of its results are described in the following chapters. Those results include the declining legitimacy of democratic institutions, the promotion of anarchy and license in the moral order, and advancing tyranny in the social order. The upshot is that the democratic nation is helpless before an antidemocratic, indeed a despotic, judiciary. The American people seem, at the moment, to be submissive and without the political will to reclaim the liberty that is rightfully theirs.
8
The Case for Censorship
T he destruction of standards is inherent in radical individualism, but it could hardly have been accomplished so rapidly or so completely without the assistance of the American judiciary. Wielding a false modern liberal version of the First Amendment, the courts have destroyed laws that created pockets of resistance to vulgarity and obscenity.
Sooner or later censorship is going to have to be considered as popular culture continues plunging to ever more sickening lows. The alternative to censorship, legal and moral, will be a brutalized and chaotic culture, with all that that entails for our society, economy, politics, and physical safety. It is important to be clear about the topic. I am
not
suggesting that censorship should, or constitutionally could, be employed to counter the liberal political and cultural propagandizing of movies, television, network news, and music. They are protected, and properly so, by the First Amendments guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press. I
am
suggesting that censorship be considered for the most violent and sexually explicit material now on offer, starting with the obscene prose and pictures available on the Internet, motion pictures that are mere rhapsodies to violence, and the more degenerate lyrics of rap music.
Censorship is a subject that few people want to discuss, notbecause it has been tried and found dangerous or oppressive but because the ethos of modern liberalism has made any interference with the individuals self-gratification seem shamefully reactionary. Dole, Bennett, Tucker, and Leo, while denouncing some of the worst aspects of popular culture, were all quick to protest that they were not for censorship. That may be a tactical necessity, at least at this stage of the debate, since it has become virtually a condition of intellectual and social respectability to make that disclaimer. And it is true that there are a variety of actions short of censorship that should be tried. One is to organize boycotts of the other products sold by corporations that market filth. But what happens if a corporation decides it prefers the bottom line to responsibility? What happens if the company does not market other products that can be boycotted? So long as there exists a lucrative market for obscenity, somebody will supply it. That brings us back to “And then what?“
Is censorship really as unthinkable as we all seem to assume? That it is unthinkable is a very recent conceit. From the earliest colonies on this continent over 300 hundred years ago, and for about 175 years of our existence as a nation, we endorsed and lived with censorship. We do not have to imagine what censorship might be like; we know from experience. Some of it was formal, written in statutes or city ordinances; some of it was informal, as in the movie producers’ agreement to abide by the rulings of the Hayes office. Some of it was inevitably silly—the rule that the movies could not show even a husband and wife fully dressed on a bed unless each had one foot on the floor—and some of it was no doubt pernicious. The period of Hayes office censorship was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the golden age of the movies.
The questions to be considered are whether such material has harmful effects, whether it is constitutionally possible to censor it, and whether technology may put some of it beyond society’s capacity to control it.
It is possible to argue for
8
The Case for Censorship
T he destruction of standards is inherent in radical individualism, but it could hardly have been accomplished so rapidly or so completely without the assistance of the American judiciary. Wielding a false modern liberal version of the First Amendment, the courts have destroyed laws that created pockets of resistance to vulgarity and obscenity.
Sooner or later censorship is going to have to be considered as popular culture continues plunging to ever more sickening lows. The alternative to censorship, legal and moral, will be a brutalized and chaotic culture, with all that that entails for our society, economy, politics, and physical safety. It is important to be clear about the topic. I am
not
suggesting that censorship should, or constitutionally could, be employed to counter the liberal political and cultural propagandizing of movies, television, network news, and music. They are protected, and properly so, by the First Amendments guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press. I
am
suggesting that censorship be considered for the most violent and sexually explicit material now on offer, starting with the obscene prose and pictures available on the Internet, motion pictures that are mere rhapsodies to violence, and the more degenerate lyrics of rap music.
Censorship is a subject that few people want to discuss, notbecause it has been tried and found dangerous or oppressive but because the ethos of modern liberalism has made any interference with the individuals self-gratification seem shamefully reactionary. Dole, Bennett, Tucker, and Leo, while denouncing some of the worst aspects of popular culture, were all quick to protest that they were not for censorship. That may be a tactical necessity, at least at this stage of the debate, since it has become virtually a condition of intellectual and social respectability to make that disclaimer. And it is true that there are a variety of actions short of censorship that should be tried. One is to organize boycotts of the other products sold by corporations that market filth. But what happens if a corporation decides it prefers the bottom line to responsibility? What happens if the company does not market other products that can be boycotted? So long as there exists a lucrative market for obscenity, somebody will supply it. That brings us back to “And then what?“
Is censorship really as unthinkable as we all seem to assume? That it is unthinkable is a very recent conceit. From the earliest colonies on this continent over 300 hundred years ago, and for about 175 years of our existence as a nation, we endorsed and lived with censorship. We do not have to imagine what censorship might be like; we know from experience. Some of it was formal, written in statutes or city ordinances; some of it was informal, as in the movie producers’ agreement to abide by the rulings of the Hayes office. Some of it was inevitably silly—the rule that the movies could not show even a husband and wife fully dressed on a bed unless each had one foot on the floor—and some of it was no doubt pernicious. The period of Hayes office censorship was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the golden age of the movies.
The questions to be considered are whether such material has harmful effects, whether it is constitutionally possible to censor it, and whether technology may put some of it beyond society’s capacity to control it.
It is possible to argue for
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