censorship, as Stanley Brubaker, a professor of political science, does, 1 on the ground that in a republican form of government where the people rule, it is crucial that the character of the citizenry not be debased. By now we should have gotten over the liberal notion that its citizens’ characters are none of the business of government. The government ought nottry to impose virtue, but it can deter incitements to vice. “Liberals have always taken the position,” the late Christopher Lasch wrote, “that democracy can dispense with civic virtue. According to this way of thinking, it is liberal institutions, not the character of citizens, that make democracy work.“ 2 He cited India and Latin America as proof that formally democratic institutions are not enough for a workable social order, a proof that is disheartening as the conditions in parts of large American cities approach those of the Third World.
Lasch stressed “the degree to which liberal democracy has lived off the borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism.“ 3 Certainly, the great religions of the West—Christianity and Judaism—taught moral truths about respect for others, honesty, sexual fidelity, truth-speaking, the value of work, respect for the property of others, and self-restraint. With the decline of religious influence, the moral lessons attenuate as well. Morality is an essential soil for free and democratic governments. A people addicted to instant gratification through the vicarious (and sometimes not so vicarious) enjoyment of mindless violence and brutal sex is unlikely to provide such a soil. A population whose mental faculties are coarsened and blunted, whose emotions are few and simple, is unlikely to be able to make the distinctions and engage in the discourse that democratic government requires.
I find Brubaker and Lasch persuasive. We tend to think of virtue as a personal matter, each of us to choose which virtues to practice or not practice—the privatization of morality, or, if you will, the “pursuit of happiness,” as each of us defines happiness. But only a public morality, in which trust, truth-telling, and self-control are prominent features, can long sustain a decent social order and hence a stable and just democratic order. If the social order continues to unravel, we may respond with a more authoritarian government that is capable of providing at least personal safety.
There is, of course, more to the case for censorship than the need to preserve a viable democracy. We need also to avoid the social devastation wrought by pornography and endless incitements to murder and mayhem. Whatever the effects upon our capacity to govern ourselves, living in a culture that saturates uswith pictures of sex and violence is aesthetically ugly, emotionally flattening, and physically dangerous.
There are, no doubt, complex causes for illegitimacy and violence in today’s society, but it seems impossible to deny that one cause is the messages popular culture insistently presses on us. Asked about how to diminish illegitimacy, a woman who worked with unmarried teenage mothers replied tersely: “Shoot Madonna.” That may be carrying censorship a bit far, but one sees her point. Madonna’s forte is sexual incitement. We live in a sex-drenched culture. The forms of sexual entertainment rampant in our time are overwhelming to the young, who would, even without such stimulations, have difficulty enough resisting the song their hormones sing. There was a time, coinciding with the era of censorship, when most did resist.
Young males, who are more prone to violence than females or older males, witness so many gory depictions of killing that they are bound to become desensitized to it. We now have teenagers and even subteenagers who shoot if they feel they have been “dissed” (shown disrespect). Indeed, the newspapers bring us stories of murders done for simple pleasure, the killing of a stranger
Lasch stressed “the degree to which liberal democracy has lived off the borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism.“ 3 Certainly, the great religions of the West—Christianity and Judaism—taught moral truths about respect for others, honesty, sexual fidelity, truth-speaking, the value of work, respect for the property of others, and self-restraint. With the decline of religious influence, the moral lessons attenuate as well. Morality is an essential soil for free and democratic governments. A people addicted to instant gratification through the vicarious (and sometimes not so vicarious) enjoyment of mindless violence and brutal sex is unlikely to provide such a soil. A population whose mental faculties are coarsened and blunted, whose emotions are few and simple, is unlikely to be able to make the distinctions and engage in the discourse that democratic government requires.
I find Brubaker and Lasch persuasive. We tend to think of virtue as a personal matter, each of us to choose which virtues to practice or not practice—the privatization of morality, or, if you will, the “pursuit of happiness,” as each of us defines happiness. But only a public morality, in which trust, truth-telling, and self-control are prominent features, can long sustain a decent social order and hence a stable and just democratic order. If the social order continues to unravel, we may respond with a more authoritarian government that is capable of providing at least personal safety.
There is, of course, more to the case for censorship than the need to preserve a viable democracy. We need also to avoid the social devastation wrought by pornography and endless incitements to murder and mayhem. Whatever the effects upon our capacity to govern ourselves, living in a culture that saturates uswith pictures of sex and violence is aesthetically ugly, emotionally flattening, and physically dangerous.
There are, no doubt, complex causes for illegitimacy and violence in today’s society, but it seems impossible to deny that one cause is the messages popular culture insistently presses on us. Asked about how to diminish illegitimacy, a woman who worked with unmarried teenage mothers replied tersely: “Shoot Madonna.” That may be carrying censorship a bit far, but one sees her point. Madonna’s forte is sexual incitement. We live in a sex-drenched culture. The forms of sexual entertainment rampant in our time are overwhelming to the young, who would, even without such stimulations, have difficulty enough resisting the song their hormones sing. There was a time, coinciding with the era of censorship, when most did resist.
Young males, who are more prone to violence than females or older males, witness so many gory depictions of killing that they are bound to become desensitized to it. We now have teenagers and even subteenagers who shoot if they feel they have been “dissed” (shown disrespect). Indeed, the newspapers bring us stories of murders done for simple pleasure, the killing of a stranger
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