Censorship… or Why I’ve Been Silent As Of Late

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. ~ Voltaire

Perhaps you may have noticed that after posting almost every day for about 2 months I suddenly dropped off for the last couple of weeks. Although whether you did or not is irrelevant to the primary subject of this post. I’ll get to why that was in a bit, but first… This post will hopefully simultaneously cover a few separate and distinct purposes:

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. ~ Claude-Adrien Helvétius

First is to touch on the idea of censorship, why it’s wrong in all but some very few limited situations.

The test of democracy is freedom of criticism. ~ David Ben-Gurion

The second is to “rant” a bit about an encounter we here at Thinking Critically had with censorship, in a place I would least have expected to encounter it.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values.  For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. ~ John F. Kennedy

Third, I’d like to explain why I have been negligent in blogging for the last two weeks.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too. ~ Voltaire

And the final purpose is to share a number of quotes I came across on the subject as the latest installment of my ongoing Quote Of The Moment segment.

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. ~ John Stuart Mill

Censorship is the suppression of speech or other communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body. Essentially it is the control (or attempted control) of the information and ideas circulated within a society or community.

Obscenity is not a quality inherent in a book or picture, but is solely and exclusively a contribution of the reading mind, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the qualities of a book or picture. ~ Theodore Schroeder

There are many types of censorship, and clearly some are worse than others. If a government attempts to censor what it’s citizens can say that would probably be the most egregious version. For a government to attempt to tell people what they can and can not say violates what the purpose of a government should be (that purpose being protecting and serving it’s citizens). But not all censorship is quite so obvious or quite so universally condemned.

The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen. ~ Tommy Smothers

Other forms of unjustified censorship include schools (or school boards or teachers or PTAs) banning certain books from their library because of the content of those books; groups blocking content they feel is morally questionable from being publicly available; a news outlet not proving news about something that shows their parent company in a negative light or that goes against the general theme that that news outlet typically promotes; etc…

Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself.  It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. ~ Potter Stewart

And while there may be some legitimate forms of censorship (The military keeping some things secret in order to protect troops or citizens; child pornography being banned due to it having been shown to have a detrimental effect of those children involved; ; etc), it is of the utmost importance for society that those instances should be kept as narrow as possible to avoid infringing on the rights of people.

What progress we are making.  In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.  Now they are content with burning my books. ~ Sigmund Freud

And while in many situations people may have a legitimate right to censor other (the administrators of a private school; the owner of a business; the admin of an online blog or forum; etc) the question should not not “do they have the right”, but instead it should be “should they”. The general rule of thumb, at least in my opinion, is that there is rarely a valid reason to censor information beyond the minimal (and here I would stress minimal) instances where it is justifiably done by the government.

Take away the right to say “fuck” and you take away the right to say “fuck the government.” ~ Lenny Bruce

So what does any of this have to do with a blog about critical thinking? Well as it turns out there was an issue of censorship on Thinking Critically. And as it involved one of the bloggers here at Thinking Critically, it was taken very seriously. All of the people who blog here were chosen by and “approved” by the group, and by implication share some of the same core values (specifically about blogging). Comments were deleted were on a post that is being used as the basis for an upcoming discussion group. The author felt that these comments added nothing to the discussion that would be going on, and since some of them were combative the author seemingly believed that they might be a distraction.

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. ~ Noam Chomsky

I contributed my opinion to the author, and this caused a bit (ok perhaps more than a bit) of a kerfuffle (I don’t think I’ve ever actually used that word before, hmm) among a number of the authors of the blog. And while it’s been dealt with now (including those deleted comments being restored), while it remained up in the air I felt that I could not in good conscience contribute to any forum (or more accurately, blog) that would condone the censorship of ideas.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.  If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth:  if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~ John Stuart Mill

And to end with the lighter side of censorship, Jimmy Kimmel’s Unnecessary Censorship:
[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltGmjMBrLjs]

The populist authoritarianism that is the downside of political correctness means that anyone, sometimes it seems like everyone, can proclaim their grief and have it acknowledged.  The victim culture, every sufferer grasping for their own Holocaust, ensures that anyone who feels offended can call for moderation, for dilution, and in the end, as is all too often the case, for censorship.  And censorship, that by-product of fear – stemming as it does not from some positive agenda, but from the desire to escape our own terrors and superstitions by imposing them on others – must surely be resisted. ~ Jonathon Green