Columns

Alec Dawson argues we should; Will Chisholm disagrees.

Alec:
   The arts are where the opinions and views of our society are born and shaped. Art, theatre, film, and all forms of writing are what challenge people and their ideals and often cause important changes in societal perceptions, from the exploration of sexuality in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover to the questioning of how to deal with incurable psychopaths in the film A Clockwork Orange. The other crucial thing about these two works is that they suffered from censorship, and they are classic examples of why censorship is an unjustified way of preventing discussion and reflection of our society and lives.
   Censorship is necessarily an imposition of the moral views of the state over individuals, and in the case of art it is intruding into an area that exists as an important critic of those moral views. A key example of censorship occurs in music, where radio stations are made to censor swearing, simply because the state considers it offensive, even though often swearing in music is used explicitly to question whether or not the use of a simple word really should be considered morally wrong. There will always be people who claim this ‘offensive material’ is merely for ‘shock value,’ but shock can be exactly what promotes discussion in the first place, and the same can be said to obscenity claims around Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” a classic critique of American culture.
   Crucially, art never necessarily causes harm to anyone. If people are offended by material in artwork, they don’t have to pay any attention to it. Trying to protect people from being offended is not only unnecessary, but also harmful. Conceding that some things shouldn’t be depicted or discussed in art places a further stigma around them, and allows the offended group to simply cut discussion of that issue away. This can be particularly harmful when art has to adjust to fit into censorship criteria, which often happens when films have to change their content to please the censors. This also happened recently when the rapper Nas was forced to change the title of an album from Nigger, when the intention of the title and the album was to question racist issues in America and the use of that term most often associated with racism. We should always be open to our moral views being questioned, and by censoring art, we are preventing the best medium through which they are questioned.
 
   Will:
   It’s difficult to think of a more pejorative term in intellectual circles than censorship: the mere mention of it is usually enough to encourage someone to self-righteously quote Voltaire: “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet strangely enough, these same people never seem so desperate to defend child pornography, or advocate the repeal of the laws that censor it. Sure, child porn is an extreme example, but it demonstrates that, whether willing to acknowledge it or not, we are all censors – so the right to free expression is a question of degree, not principle.
   I will acknowledge that, theoretically at least, censorship has the potential to prevent the dissemination of work of artistic merit, but in Western liberal countries the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of free expression that this isn’t a danger we need to be concerned about. Censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was lifted in the UK in 1960, so Alec is relitigating cultural wars fought two generations ago. And in the case of both A Clockwork Orange and Nigger there was no censorship at all: Kubrick himself withdrew the movie from British circulation, and Nas’ album title was censored by the long arm of his record label, not the state. 
   The question about censorship should thus be the line at which we decide that works of cultural garbage are also actively harmful. As Alec rightly points out, art plays a crucial role in our lives: it shapes the way we see the world. But in his view, this shaping can only be for the better: even if we have an obviously harmful activity, such as the violent sexual domination of women, depicted in a positive light, then this is an opportunity to have a fuller and more constructive discussion about sexuality. To me, such portrayals are more likely an opportunity to normalise such behaviours, and whet the viewer’s appetite for more. This is borne out by the direction in which pornography has developed as laws around it have been liberalised: it has been depraved misogyny, not tasteful erotica, that has flourished. This in turn shapes viewers’ perspectives on the world, something psychologists have demonstrated in controlled experiments, where those exposed to pornography over a prolonged period report dramatically more accepting attitudes to rape. Similar relationships hold for depictions of sadistic violence. These harms may be diffuse, but they are very real, and provide strong grounds for censorship of the arts.