What are the right mechanisms for censorship?

Oddly, in one respect (and in one respect only) I find myself more in agreement with Tim Squirrell and Niamh McIntyre than with Brendan O'Neill.

That is, I do believe that there is a place for censorship in a civilised society. We limit freedom of speech when it threatens the public good (such as shouting 'fire' in a crowded cinema) and when it incites to criminality (such as calling on people to riot) and rightly so. Until recently, recognising the dangerous potency of material inciting blood-lust and sexual lust, we placed limits on 'entertainment' that incited these, too.

Joseph Shaw makes the point that 'I would not accept an invitation to debate whether Jews should be massacred, for example, even to argue that they should not be, because this is not a topic which should be open for discussion, and having a formal debate about it legitimises, to some extent, the side in favour.' And again, I think he is probably right here. But a debate, and in particular a debate in a University, is the last thing that should be censored: precisely because it is a debate, and it is a University (as Joseph Shaw also points out, here.) Such censorship should only be exercised in extremis.

Free speech is one of those things, like democracy itself, which is a secondary good; making it into an ultimate good is heresy - or even idolatry, setting it up as a False God. 

Everyone, in practice, except the extraordinarily unreflective or the ideologically extreme, agrees with some censorship.

The question is, what are the right mechanisms for censorship, and ultimately, who gets to decide.

In a parliamentary democracy, the idea is that an elected parliament is the least worst solution to that problem. It is not ideal - and our current parliamentarians who seem dedicated to pushing the voting public into the arms of rabble-rousing populists by their unprincipled approach exemplify why - but it is certainly better than students whose intellectual development seems to be limited to slogans that can be printed on a Student Union T-shirt - and the Christ Church censors who caved in to their threats.

False Gods of Our Time 2: Politics

Politics is essential, of course.  As man is made to live in community, we must have ways to organise and govern ourselves, and that is the essence of politics. In particular, it is the art of recruiting people to a particular point of view or programme of action, in order to advance it.  

It is potentially a noble art, and has indeed had many noble exponents. It is also, when corrupted, potentially very evil, but that is not the aspect I wish to focus on here.

Rather, as with my previous post on Choice, I wish to consider the problems that arise when we elevate politics from being something important to being the only important thing.

I think there are at least three types of problem that arise from this:

One is that people start to see everything through political lenses.  Thus we read of issues in the Church being of the right or of the left.  That is usually a flawed analysis, which not only oversimplifies ecclesiastical issues, but also reduces theological discussion to politics.  The C of E’s current discussions around ‘women bishops’ are enmired in politics, for example.  Likewise social issues are debated at an incredibly superficial level along almost tribal political lines: private education is ‘bad’ if you are on the left, and ‘good’ if you are on the right - often with no pause to consider what education is meant to be, what the Church teaches us about it, and what kinds of private and state education we are actually comparing.  Further, any idea proposed by political opponents is automatically seen through a prejudicial mist of suspicion, with an eye to making political capital out of presenting it in as unsympathetic light as possible, regardless of any real merit it may have.  That then leads to all the dishonesty of spinning that has helped bring politics into serious disrepute.

A second is that people start to behave from political motives when spiritual motives are required.  I have come across a number of instances recently, particularly in discussions re abortion and euthanasia, where some things are deemed unsayable or undiscussable for fear of the way in which those with a different agenda might manipulate the debate.  I would rather that the criterion we use is truth. If some truths are open to misunderstanding, there is a second-level question about how to put them across, but to say we should not say something we know to be true because it may be used against us strikes me as wrong-headed.

The third is that people get so attached to political theories and indeed political causes or alignments that they treat religious and moral issues as secondary, where they should be primary.  Thus they end up doing all sorts of harm in the pursuit of political goods: they attach themselves to (and justify themselves by) the notion that a mandate from the people justifies a whole programme of action, when it is just as likely to be an expression of fed-upness with the other scoundrels.  So we get disastrous policies for the most vulnerable in society, such as children in need of adoption, in pursuit of some sort of political ideology; we are witnessing the progressive destruction of the institution of marriage as a result of a number of policies, each seemingly benign in intent, and so on - because the big moral questions have been obscured by the political questions.

False Gods of Our Time: 1 Choice

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.

I have been mulling over, for the last few weeks or more, the various false Gods we have sought to set up in place of the One True God.

In particular, I am thinking of things such as choice, democracy, politics, equality and so forth.  Clearly these are not evil; indeed they are good in and of themselves.  But when we make a god of any one of them, we corrupt the good that it represents, and ourselves.

Let’s start with choice. (I may pick off the others in future posts - I seem to remember promising someone a post on the heresy of politics a while back).

Choice is clearly a good: it is a gift from God, which enables us to choose the good, and thus conform ourselves to Him and fulfil our nature and our destiny; or not, of course.  For so great is our God that He really allows that.

But problems arise when we elevate choice from a good to the good.  The most obvious example is the elevation of a woman’s right to autonomy to include the killing of a child.

That gives us a clue to one of the problems of individual choice: my choice may constrain someone else’s.  With abortion, that is extremely clear, but consider the choice of a couple with kids both to go to work.  That choice, when multiplied up and down the land effectively denies the choice of other parents for one of them to stay at home to raise their children.  The reasons are not just the economic ones (two-income households drive up the cost of housing etc) but also the social ones: it becomes less socially acceptable to be a full time mum (or dad), and much more socially isolated.  The old support network of mums via coffee mornings etc has largely disappeared.  So my choices affect others, and not always in obvious ways.

Sitting behind all this is a philosophy that all freely-chosen autonomous choice is ipso facto good, or more specifically, good for that person. That is the philosophy behind Carl Rogers’ work - the back drop for all non-directional counselling, which has now become such a dominant philosophy that even pro-life groups adopt it, when they know that, in truth, there is a good choice or a bad choice to be made...

That way madness lies, in fact, and Rogers (according to his friend and associate William Coulson) was bordering on the loss of his own personality by the end of his life.

The most extreme example of choice being deified which I have encountered is in the thinking of William Schutz, who believed that we choose everything in our lives: including our accidents, our illnesses, our death - and our parents...  

Nutty?  Perhaps.  But extremely influential, and his understanding of group dynamics (including the tools he developed FIRO, FIRO-B, FIRO-S etc) is widely used in corporate life.

Most insidious, therefore, is the way in which my choices may affect me.  For of course any choice made, by definition, limits my successive choices. The choice to indulge my appetites rules out the choice for ascetism; the choice to hurt another rules our the choice to be charitable, and so on.  And these choices, over time, form (or deform) my character. So the choice to treat Choice as an ultimate good is a choice to deny God - and ultimately to destroy myself.

False Gods

It seems to me that modern Western societies have made false Gods out of (inter alia):

• Equality
• Autonomy
• Democracy
• Choice
• Tolerance

That is not to say that these are not goods, but that they are not ultimate goods.  When they are elevated to absolute status, they are not only destructive, they are self-destructive.

C S Lewis (of course) identified the problem accurately in First and Second Things: 

The woman who makes a dog the centre of her life loses, in the end, not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog-keeping. 

The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoying the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication. 

It is a glorious thing to feel for a moment or two that the whole meaning of the universe is summed up in one woman—glorious so long as other duties and pleasures keep tearing you away from her. But clear the decks and so arrange your life (it is sometimes feasible) that you will have nothing to do but contemplate her, and what happens? 

Of course this law has been discovered before, but it will stand re-discovery. It may be stated as follows: every preference of a small good to a great, or partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice is made. 

. . . You can’t get second things by putting them first. You get second things only by putting first things first.

So if we pursue equality, say, as an ultimate good, we end up not just doing a great deal of harm, but also undermining equality itself.

How does that work?  Well, consider the issue of equality for women: a laudable aim, in many ways.  But when pushed to the extreme, we find that it includes the right of women to kill their unborn children - for being female.  See the comments under Madeleine Teahan’s Guardian Online article for a very stark demonstration of that simple truth.

With very little effort one can see the same principle at work when any of these other secondary goods is elevated to the status of an absolute good.

What we are called to do, of course, is to acknowledge that God is the top of the hierarchy.  These secondary goods (equality and the rest) are often useful indicators of where something has gone wrong; if they are being abused, it is a clue, worthy of investigation.  Even democracy (eg when operated in a corrupted society) is not sovereign.  It is (normally) a safeguard; it is not an absolute good.

Even in terms of a scale of values, these principles are not ultimate.  According to Catholic tradition, we should always start with Faith, Hope and Charity, and then consider Justice, Fortitude, Temperance and Prudence.  Apply those to the abortion debate and, not surprisingly, you get a completely different, and far more humane, set of priorities for both mother and child.

Neglected...

Every now and then, I look back over past posts, and occasionally I come across something I feel was neglected... This was from 2007, when even you weren't reading this blog...

Prophets of Doom

I read this quotation recently:

"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice." G. K. Chesterton.

It cast some light on my resistance to the prophets of gloom whose current demon is Global Warming. Whilst I am prepared to believe there is a problem, and certainly that we should not pour filth out into the atmosphere without heed to the damage we do, there is something about the fiercest prophets of doom which repels me. And it is precisely as Chesterton points out: focusing too much on these issues takes our attention from the real dangers.

Which is why it is particularly sad to see so many religious leaders jumping so whole-heartedly onto the green bandwagon.

Looking back over my life, I have been assured that many things (nuclear anihilation, over-population etc etc) were the deadliest threat facing us, complete with graphs or data proving that unless drastic action were taken we would never survive until the millenium. And yet here we are...

Prophets of Doom

I read this quotation recently:

"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice." G. K. Chesterton.

It cast some light on my resistance to the prophets of gloom whose current demon is Global Warming. Whilst I am prepared to believe there is a problem, and certainly that we should not pour filth out into the atmosphere without heed to the damage we do, there is something about the fiercest prophets of doom which repels me. And it is precisely as Chesterton points out: focusing too much on these issues takes our attention from the real dangers.

Which is why it is particularly sad to see so many religious leaders jumping so whole-heartedly onto the green bandwagon.

Looking back over my life, I have been assured that many things (nuclear anihilation, over-population etc etc) were the deadliest threat facing us, complete with graphs or data proving that unless drastic action were taken we would never survive until the millenium. And yet here we are...