The Inspector-General of Misconception (17 page)

We at the Inspectorate had to rub our eyes with befuddlement.

Befuddlement is not a state of mind with which we here at the Inspectorate are overly familiar.

It was as if we had been in a deep after-lunch sleep and had awoken – not some time in the future, but back in our more tumultuous past. Back in the seventies, no less.

It was not an agreeable sensation: we are not up to returning to the seventies.

But until 1972 Australia, along with Ireland, was the most censored Western country.

This disagreeable sense of déjà vu was caused by growing evidence of a resurgence of the dreaded Urge to Censor.

The internet panic, the re-establishment of federal and state censorship, racial vilification acts – all show us
that the bitch is on heat again.

The Urge is always propelled by ‘new' concerns and is often a reflex of social panic.

What is ‘new' about the demands for censorship?

The Canadian censorship law of 1992, which was the result of extremist feminist lobbying and does not represent most feminist thinking, is new.

To put it simply, the Canadian law would censor material which, it is argued, would lead to the harming of women and would classify such material as a form of sexual discrimination.

The harm was seen as essentially psychological in that it was argued that such material had a negative impact on an individual woman's self-worth.

But those of the pro-censorship feminist position also posit that some material leads to direct violence against women and when this material can be identified it should be banned. (There is a strong body of feminist argument against censorship; see the fine work,
Bad Girls
by Catharine Lumby, Allen and Unwin.)

However, the Canadian legislation went ahead regardless of the absence of an established relationship between published material and dangerous behaviour. A relationship which never can be established (see below).

‘Psychological damage' is a slippery concept, anyhow.

The so-called ‘correlation studies' were nicely dismissed by Jay Garfield in
Quadrant
. ‘Nothing in the correlation studies eliminates the overwhelmingly plausible
tertium quid
hypothesis [a third thing, indefinite and undefined, related in some way to two definite or known
things, but distinct from both]: given that two phenomena are correlated, it may be that they are each effects of a common cause and … The fact that virtually all the paedophiles in the Chicago police study were raised as Christians does not implicate Christianity as a cause of paedophilia.'

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 frightens 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.'