Tools for Thinking About Censorship

https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/

by Arnt • 3 years ago

15 5 3 years ago

"We cannot and should not draw a line between state censorship and private or civilian censorship" instead we can and should draw a line between "government or other large-scale organized action" and "cultural pressures or other non-state action". The former is censorship, the other is non-censorship.

Is there such a thing as non-state large-scale organized action? Can cultural pressure be large-scale and organized? The author doesn't ask such questions. His definitions follow his examples and define them as censorship when he likes what is being censored and as not-censorship when he dislikes what is being not-censored.

In the copy shown above (now at my university’s library in Chicago), an Inquisitor has faithfully gone through page by page and excised the controversial sections, scribbling them over with ink, or when both sides of a page were condemned cutting them out with scissors. This took hours of work by a highly-trained, expensive-to-hire, Latin-reading Inquisitor. It would have taken seconds to throw this book on the fire.
The Roman Inquisition in the 1500s was constantly complaining about its desperate lack of personnel (not enough Inquisitors, not enough censors to read books, not enough police) as it tried to keep up with the exponentially-growing flood of books enabled by the newfangled printing press. Why would such an organization waste hundreds of man-hours per copy on crossing out pages when they could have trivially burned the book and moved on?

There's a very simple answer to this, which is that like most censors, the Inquisition did not want to destroy any kind of thought, but only the truly dangerous kind.

This doesn't occur to the author, because his project is not figuring out what censorship is and why people censor, but rather separating it into good and bad censorship. Good censorship is not censorship at all, bad censorship is something inexplicable, rather we have to explain why someone who is engaged in bad censorship restrains himself. It's simple: People feel bad about censorship, unless they convince themselves that the kind of censorship they engage in is not censorship at all.

The author mentions a film rating that is shown before a movie as an example of a didactic tool, showing the censors power. I wonder what he would make of the following paragraph on the first page of an edition of Kant's Critiques published by Wilder Publications in 2008:

This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.

Nothing, of course. This is not an example of (bad) censorship due to "government or other large-scale organized action" but rather an example of (good) not-censorship due to "cultural pressures or other non-state action".

Arnt2• 2 years ago

Regarding large-scale non-state action. In the town where I spent my teens:

1. The biggest hotel and best restaurant was built by the teetotallers' association, which gathered funding to ensure that a good meal could be had in a restaurant without wine. It founded at least several such things, maybe even many.

2. One of the two newspapers was founded by by a trade union, which founded several dozen.

3. A third NGO performed one the important emergency services, namely at sea. (This was a small town with a deepwater port.)

All of these had dozens of branches. One of the national NGOs had branches on all continents (this is a national NGO, not an international one). Yes, large-scale non-state organized action is possible.

amadeuspagel3• 2 years ago

Interesting examples. I ask this question because the author tries to distinguish between "government or other large-scale organized action" which can be censorship and "cultural pressures or other non-state action" which can't be. To me these examples show that this distinction doesn't make sense.

Tools for Thinking About Censorship

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