The Inspector-General of Misconception

by Frank Moorhouse

  The Urge to Censor is driven by a fear of disorder; a fear of sexuality; and a desire to protect the children from ‘corruption’.

  The arguments against censorship which began in our culture with John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) are not changed by the new thinking.

  And they continue to answer the Urge to Censor.

  We have therefore made Twelve Findings on Cultural Censorship.

  We use the term Cultural Censorship to mean the use of censorship against media, entertainment, the arts, and in the circulation of ideas (as distinct from legal and security censorship, see below).

  Our findings are as follows.

  1. Censorship misconstrues the way communication works

  Censorship, by its very rationale, crudifies and misunderstands the experience of communication. The censors believe that they know what ‘the message’ is that is being sent, what the message is that is being received, and what the effect of that message will be on the person who received it.

  In storytelling, as in all communication, it is not possible to know what is being received and taken from the story by the person who is taking in the story.

  That is the fundamental misunderstanding of censorship.

  But even in the most basic storytelling, a person may play all, or none of, the parts – victim and aggressor, child and parent, male and female, witch and frightened child.

  Nor can the ‘message’ be received by a person without that person making modifications and interpretations to that experience. Those who study communication have long stressed that there cannot be a ‘solitary’ recipient of a media message. Although we might read or watch while physically ‘alone’, we are receiving the message through social and personal screens which have been put in place not only by the wider society but also by our primary groups and primary experiences – family, friends, education, workplace, ethics – which formed us, let alone our ongoing updating of our knowledge of the world.

  Everyone brings to a media message a set of other experiences which affect and control the message.

  2. The fallacy of media-effect experiments

  It is logically impossible to ‘experiment’ with the communication experience at any sophisticated level.

  An experiment would have to isolate the effect of the media message from the social context, from the personal conditioning of the recipient, from the current moods or preoccupations of the experiment subjects. How would one do that?

  3. Entrusting others

  Whether it be a censorship board of citizens or ‘experts’ or a court, censorship always involves entrusting to others the right to choose what intellectual or imaginative communications may take place.

  This power to decide what people may or may not say to each other directly denies to an individual the opportunity to judge and assess for themselves.

  It directly denies to the individual the capacity to think for themselves.

  Censorship is, then, the passing over to others our own critical judgment. John Milton said that it is the equivalent of allowing one’s neighbour to decide for us what we might read.

  4. The acceptance of intellectual blindness

  The most pernicious characteristic of censorship is that it is a blinding of the citizen because it is in the nature of the censorship procedure that it cannot show us what it is that is being censored.

  It can abstractly describe or categorise, but the essential censored item has to be concealed from us. The censor knows: we are not to know.

  There are strictly explicit categories where that which is censored can be known by concrete category if not by detail but they are few (see below, under exceptions).

  5. Bypassing intellectual contest

  There is much in the nature of life and therefore in the flow of communication which sickens, appals, offends or insults, and legally ‘injures’ (as in defamation). But suppression by censorship bypasses the intellectual methods of opposing these things – argument, satire, avoidance, protest, rejection, ridicule, correction.

  Censorship not only denies to us the judgment about what to reject or accept into our lives, it denies us the exercise of engagement with that which is censored.

  6. Censorship widens beyond its legislative boundaries

  The experience of Australian censorship in recent times demonstrates that there are no defined boundaries to censorship once it begins.

  It is further widened by media practitioners through their personal work-a-day interpretations.

  That is, censorship spawns sub-legislative censorship through the haphazard and wild interpretations by people in the media as to what the law means or what is legally permissible.

  There is a tendency under censorship for people such as editors and programmers to err on ‘the safe side’ of legislation. Thus this self-censoring by the media becomes more stringent than the original censorship legislation.

  7. Empowering of fallacy

  It is the wisdom of liberal democratic experience that the suppression of ‘unacceptable messages’ does not wholly eliminate these messages but does, however, give them a potent subterranean existence beyond the reach of intellectual refutation by open discussion and social contest. Censored videos and books circulate on a black market and gain a weird uncritically accepted and privileged status.

  8. The contrary effects of censorship

  Oddly, the use of censorship places moralistic governments in a strange bind. By saying that communication x is unacceptable in a civilised society, they tacitly state that all else which is available in the great marketplace of communication is acceptable in a civilised society (that is, all sorts of unpalatable advertising, unfair and vicious journalism and other media madnesses).

  To escape this bind, the State must either abandon censorship or extend it infinitely, according to the fashions and concerns of the government or courts of the day. That is why censorship never recedes. It can only creep.

  9. There is no limit to what governments will choose to censor

  All governments this century, except the Whitlam and Hawke Labor governments and the Fraser Liberal government, have been active censors.

  Over the one hundred years since Federation, the following subjects have been censored by Australian governments: swear words, blasphemy, offence to the monarchy, advocacy of communism, advocacy of anarchism, irreverence to religion, advocacy of political assassination, ‘horror’ stories, advocacy of witchcraft, birth control information, advocacy of the social benefits of prostitution, advocacy of the social benefits of masturbation, opposition to marriage, advocacy of single-parent childbearing, the belittling or denigration of members of the armed forces, descriptions of homosexual behaviour, descriptions of heterosexual sex, material offence to an allied nation, giving comfort to an enemy nation. (In 1968, the film Inside North Vietnam was banned.)

  And it is not all in the distant past. Most of the above categories were censored in the time since World War Two.

  10. Dread of new technologies

  Censorship always fears most the newest medium and thus with the arrival of the internet, we have a replay of the panic which drives all censorship, as we did with television, radio, recorded music, film and the printing press.

  Something presented in a new medium, with a new technology, seems very powerful and alarming even when it is age-old themes and content which are being presented in the new technologies.

  Every new media technology attracts social attention and that attention sees afresh what is no longer seen or worried about in the older technologies.

  It casts content into a sharper visibility. A new technology is a convenient scapegoat for our fears of disorder and transgression.

  In part too, it is the revolutionary claims of those who ‘crusade’ for new technologies which reinforce the social panic. The crusaders, by claiming that a new communications technology will transform the human condition, bring down on themselves the irrational fears of the community.

  11. Who frighte
ns the censors?

  It is worth remembering that the following writers have been banned in Australia because of their perceived threat to society: James Joyce, D.H Lawrence, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Honoré Balzac, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Colette, Norman Lindsay, Aldous Huxley, John Dos Passos, Hermann Broch, Erskine Caldwell, Jean Devanny, Radclyffe Hall, J.D. Salinger, Celine, Henry Miller, Bernard Shaw, Erich Remarque, Jonathan Swift, Max Harris, Brendan Behan, Walt Whitman, Philip Roth, Alex Buzo, Jean-Claude van Itallie, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Ian Fleming, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway.

  It is worth recalling that many of these writers were banned in Australia within the last fifty years.

  If you don’t believe this list, check with Peter Coleman’s key work Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition: Censorship in Australia (1962).

  12. Gary Glitter and the question of children

  Gary Glitter, a nearly forgotten English pop star, was gaoled for having downloaded onto his computer child-porn material which was described by those who saw it as being extraordinarily disturbing, sickening.

  There is consensus that those who exploit children by involving them, or forcing them, into the creation of sexually explicit material should be prosecuted.

  What is not clear is that the viewing of any media product which emanates from this unacceptable activity should in itself be seen as criminal.

  Once material, however ugly, exists no harm is done to anyone by someone seeing that material.

  Take the example of the invasion of the privacy of the late Princess Diana while she was working out in a gym.

  The photographer who took the photograph may have committed a crime; the paper which published it may have breached ethical guidelines.

  But we who bought the newspaper and viewed the photographs did not breach her privacy. That had already been breached.

  We may be voyeurs, but we are not criminals.

  And, as an observer of human sexuality and censorship, we would be curious to view what it was that someone such as Gary Glitter wanted to download.

  We would be prepared to be sickened.

  As observers of the human condition, we would like to see what it was that sickened and disturbed the jury and what it is that people who want this sort of material for sexual gratification actually crave.

  The combination of sexuality and children is the most contentious of the contemporary issues and a rightly perplexed social critic, Wendy Steiner, discusses it well, especially the dilemma of American photographer, Sally Mann.

  Mann’s photographs ‘… set out to capture girls on the cusp between childhood and adolescence …’ and according to Steiner,… ‘revealed every fear we have about the discrepancy between the knowledge of subject, photographer and viewer.’

  Mann, in her own commentary for the photographs said, ‘The twelve-year-old … disarms me with her sure sense of her own attractiveness and, with it, her direct, even provocative approach to the camera.’

  To involve your children (or any children) in the creation of art works with sexual overtones, as Sally Mann did as a parent, is fraught, especially in photography where a fictional ‘mask’ is not always possible.

  On the vexed subject of sexual relationship between children and adults, Steiner comes close to the views of the ornery feminist, Camille Paglia. Paglia has said, ‘We quite rightly talk and pay attention to the injured in older/younger sexual relationships but the bulk of such relationships, experience and sense tells us, were neither good nor bad nor dangerous nor damaging nor enriching – yet some were inspiring mentorships, replete with learning and caring.’

  At present, the efforts to separate out the diversity of such relationships is usually defeated in public discussion by the heat of the subject.

  Exceptions

  We concede that the community has legitimate cause to suppress some information and that this suppression does not necessarily incur the risks outlined above.

  These are: Protection of the young by suppressing their names in court cases; information which endangers the armed forces in time of conflict (this does not mean the suppression of debate about the rights or wrongs of a conflict, we have in mind information strategically or tactically valuable to the enemy); misleading, false product information which is physically dangerous; the spreading of information useful to those who would inflict physical violence on the society (eg. how to make postal bombs, even though attempts to censor this information may be a futile exercise).

  And of course, the text-book example of shouting ‘fire’ at public gatherings.

  No more nonsense

  We wish to hear no more nonsense about censorship and we hereby urge the government to dismantle its spreading censorship apparatus.

  In conclusion, we ask the wonderfully paradoxical question, so well expounded in the words of A.D. Hope: ‘What makes the censor immune from the undesirable and corrupting effects of the material to which they themselves are daily exposed and which they deem to be corrupting to the rest of us?’

  OH DEAR, ANOTHER FALSE ‘GENERATIONAL’ CONTROVERSY

  A Tiresome Allegation: Mark Davis, in his book Gangland, argues that his generation – the under-forties – have been silenced or robbed of their future by the stranglehold on our culture by the over-forties.

  Those Mark calls ‘the cultural gatekeepers’.

  What Our Office found was another bigger message coming up from the book and its language. A message that Mark himself is probably not altogether aware of.

  But his generation, after all, taught us that books cannot know themselves and that some readings of a work can reveal things the work cannot say or see for itself.

  The book, and its reviews, show to us that the intelligentsia of both Mark’s generation and the older generations are somewhat like teenage gangs wandering the streets in search of an enemy.

  At first, we wondered why it was that such sound and fury (and humbug) was being brought by an intelligent contemporary writer against such a tiresome subject as the ‘conflict of the generations’.

  Life doesn’t divide into ‘decades’ or generations. We choose to talk as if there were such a generally shared characteristic belonging to decades or generations – such as the permissive society, the greedy eighties, or the somnolent fifties, or the lost generation – but these are simply amusing dinner party fictions, caricatures.

  It would be nice if it was in the nature of things for every calendar decade to have a distinctive and colourful ‘character’ and to come with a memorable label and a refreshing way of thinking and being.

  Our Office records show that sadly, this is not so.

  And Mark, of course, is not oblivious to the fact that this fallacious outcry of a younger generation against an older generation or the older against the younger has occurred every decade since the beginning of recorded history.

  As George Orwell said, ‘Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.’

  But we think something has changed in the last fifty years and that is what makes Gangland, on a deeper level, a very significant document.

  What has happened has been the arrival of a generation – the under-forties for want of a better term – which finds that much happened to dramatically change the world by the time they reached political awareness.

  Inescapably, the sixties and seventies have to be recognised as times of serious social and political transformation throughout the Western world.

  It is one of the huge shifts in human thinking and behaviour which is now only being properly appreciated. Only in this period, for example, did Australia begin to approach ‘fairness’ for all citizens.

  Feminism reappeared in new potent and effective forms which have made very serious changes in the interaction of the sexes never before seen in the history of the world.

  This required that the economies of the West absorb women into the workforce at all levels in a way that had never bee
n known (except in some parts of the wartime economy while men where absent from the workforce).

  It changed the family and all gender relationships.

  During the sixties and seventies, homosexuality was legalised and given a voice throughout the Western world.

  In Australia, Aboriginals were given a new public voice and image, and land rights.

  In 1972, Australia abandoned censorship.

  There was then also a massive shift of resources and consciousness to the aesthetics of living – to the arts, to gastronomy, to Australian design, to the arts of domestic and public living.

  As if this wasn’t enough, the great debate of last century between socialistic planned economies and the social democratic, free enterprise economies came to an end.

  We are still shedding the armour and demobilising the regiments of this debate and trying to find new ways to politically realign, orientate, and label ourselves.

  All this happened before the under-forties had a chance to participate.

  This is where Mark’s book comes in.

  His generation did arrive on a scene full of social glories in which the generation of the intelligentsia previous to his had participated and precipitated.

  And that generation had been remarkably victorious.

  Mark’s book reminded us of the resentment and envy of the soldiers returning from World War Two by the people too young to go to war.

  Mark’s generation finds itself in a fluid political and intellectual rearrangement without much drama. Big things happened – the shift to a predominantly market economy, for a start.

  But he is writing at a time when the words Left and Right have no meaning; although he, and the rest of us, find ourselves lapsing into habitual use of the terms.

  As the English essayist, William Hazlitt, once said of his own times, not dissimilar to ours: the players in the current political scene substitute ‘the irritation of personal feeling for the independent exertion of understanding’.