The famous liberal line—“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”—is often cited as Voltaire’s comment to Helvétius, following the burning of the latter’s De l’Esprit in 1759. In fact, Voltaire said no such thing at the time, though later, in the Dictionnaire philosophique, he wrote: “I never approved either the error of his book, or the trivial truths he so vigorously laid down. I have, however, stoutly taken his side when absurd men have condemned him for these same truths.” What he did say on the occasion of the book-burning, according to his biographer of 1888, James Parton, was “What a fuss about an omelette!”
Nonetheless, and omelettes notwithstanding, the line attributed to Voltaire has been something of a slogan for those opposed, on absolute principle, to censorship. It seems so simple, so generous: the belief that freedom of expression is an inalienable right, and that the truth will emerge victorious in a “free market” of ideas. Milton, himself a censor for a while (though, by most accounts, a benign and indulgent one), argued in Areopagitica that:
“Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
It is easy to quote Voltaire and Milton when, though disagreeing with an opponent, you are confident that their views are ineffectual. It is much harder to “defend to the death” views, or freedoms, that one regards as dangerous and abhorrent; hence proscriptions, in certain democratic countries, of “hate speech”, or Holocaust denial. Even committed liberals find that their liberalism is sorely tested by illiberal views. Ronald Reagan offered his own take on Voltaire: “Sadly I have come to realise that a great many so-called liberals ... will defend to the death your right to agree with them.”
Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, edited by Derek Jones, is a liberal publication that, in surveying the subject globally and historically—its range is tremendous, and laudable—makes no apologies for its sympathies: as Jones comments in his elegant and thorough introduction, “the encyclopedia is not a campaign document. Nevertheless, this introduction is an appropriate place to note that those in favour of censorship would be hardly likely to commission, or edit, an encyclopedia on the topic—or contribute to one.” Indeed; the publications of those in favour of censorship are more likely to be such items as the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Catholic Church, the Index of Information Not To Be Published in the Open Press of the Soviet Union, or the guidelines for customs officials in any country.
If censorship is the suppression, prevention or punishment of free expression by force or authority, then an encyclopedia of four large volumes testifies to its frequent failures and lapses. Censorship often perversely calls attention to itself—statutory provisions in law, court cases, seizures, burnings and other eruptions are highly visible signs of an urge to make materials less visible. Likewise, indexes of proscribed works can become catalogues of forbidden desire, and of desirable forbidden fruit. Wily publishers have understood since the dawn of their profession that the cachet of proscription can sell even the most artless books; Jones’s book notes that “when Mark Twain heard that the board of trustees of the Concord Public Library had voted to exclude Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from their collection, he commented ‘That will sell 25,000 copies for us, sure.’”
It would even be tempting, looking at the texts in this encyclopedia that have survived censors’ attentions, to conclude that censorship does not work; but of course, the entries that do not (and never will) appear in such an encyclopedia are the system’s successes. Books have been burned (by accident as well as design) that we will never recover now; writers have, through pressure, imprisonment, torture and murder, been prevented from even writing books. Scholars can form pictures, nonetheless, of what might be missing. The entry on China, for instance, notes a profusion of edicts in early China and under the Song dynasty, but regards them as ineffectual, given the survival of banned books from the period; and is further able to observe that, during the final years of the dynasty, “this ban [of the Jiangchao poets] was more effective than many previous ones. Texts with similar names are only mentioned again in the Qing dynasty ... and it is not known how closely they resemble the original.”
Systems of mass reproduction militate against effective elimination of texts; whereas in the early years of printing, with lower literacy rates, fewer books could be produced, the advent of electronic publishing, and the use of the Internet, have made complete suppression of texts very difficult. Even when a site can be closed down, “mirror” sites will often be established on other servers and sometimes in other countries. Globalization has had the effect of diminishing local and national censors’ powers.
Even so, there are more ways to censor materials than banning or burning them: belated acts, for the most part, that shut a stable door after the horse has bolted, and draw attention to the horse’s escape in the process. If draconian punishments are applied to those who offend the State, then inevitably all but the bravest will adopt some level of self-censorship. Censorship: A World Encyclopedia extends its already extensive range by offering articles on the concept of self-censorship, as well as on the effect that commercial practices can have on freedom of expression. The ownership of media outlets is one way in which censorship can be applied tacitly; editors will learn which stories they can pursue, and which will enrage their employers. This can equally affect any medium that relies on advertising; the withdrawal of advertising by major companies would be death to a newspaper or television station. State funding, on the other hand, opens up the possibility of the removal of subsidy if the media are too critical of the government. (The British Government retains quite sweeping powers over the BBC, for example, as Douglas Hurd’s banning of Sinn Féin voices in the late 1980s demonstrated. The setting of the level of the licence fee, the renewal of the BBC’s Charter, and the power to take over the whole Corporation, are potent threats even when not acted on.)
A further extension of the concept of censorship—stretching the word, perhaps, to breaking point, but enormously relevant to it all the same—is access. One of the most impressive features of this encyclopedia is that for each country entry (and it covers a vast number of countries), a “fact box” is supplied, listing: the population; the main religions; the official language(s); other languages spoken; illiteracy rate; number of daily newspapers; number of periodicals; number of radio receivers per 1,000 inhabitants; number of TV receivers per 1,000 inhabitants; and (where significant) the number of PCs per 1,000 inhabitants. Which reminds one that, however liberating the Internet may be, it requires, among other things, a telephone line; and that half the world’s population have never made a telephone call. What need of censorship in areas with low literacy rates, few radios and TVs, state control of those media, and no Internet access?
The emphasis in the encyclopedia—as a glance at the thematic list of entries verifies—is heavily biased towards British and American experiences, followed closely by European examples. (Some articles, while touching on universal experiences, are entirely oriented in their discussions to one or two countries.) That noted, the encyclopedia does make the point, mostly tacitly, that protesting against censorship of, for example, violence in Hollywood movies might be regarded as a luxury by writers and thinkers who are imprisoned, tortured or killed for criticizing religions or regimes in some areas of the world.
Here, the international thrust of the encyclopedia is doubly valuable; it highlights some significant continuities, across history and across different cultures, in the reasons for censorship, and the mechanisms by which it is effected; it also shows divergences and differences. It shows, in many of the larger entries, that censorship often begins as a matter of religious and political control, with those two strands in an essentially symbiotic relation; an attack on certain doctrines could easily become an attack on the head of state. This was as true of the tit-for-tat played out between Confucianism and Daoism in China as it was of the Protestant and Catholic trade-offs through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In more recent history, freedom of speech is in uneasy relation with commercial interests. The European Convention on Human Rights picks its way carefully between the needs of commercial organizations both to conceal information and to advertise their products; the desire of the State to preserve secrecy and security, and its role as a protector of “public health and morals”; and, finally, the individual’s “inalienable” right to self-expression.
The entries on the United States are particularly acute on the matter of commercial and individual freedoms, and how they have sometimes supported and sometimes threatened each other. The encyclopedia makes it clear that the First Amendment, in the hands of an independent judiciary, is an extraordinarily powerful bulwark against the many interest groups—commercial, religious, liberal, personal and paternalistic—that seek to constrain the expression of others; and one notes that neither Britain nor Europe can yet offer comparable protection (and that the US Freedom of Information Act frequently tells the British things that their own government keeps from them). At the same time, it becomes obvious that some pressures cannot be relieved by legislation—national security, commercial secrecy, the right of funding bodies to discriminate—and that some freedoms are uncomfortable ones (for some, the inability to protect children from aggressive advertising will be outrageous; for others, the inability to outlaw pornography). Nor can anything, it seems, prevent the aggressive use of political correctness to disrupt academic careers, or to eliminate “unsound” books from syllabuses and libraries. And the US has a history, even after the First Amendment, of attempts to restrict artistic and political expression: the Alien and Sedition Acts, the “Gag rule” over the South’s position on slavery, McCarthyism, and the laws on obscenity.
Obscenity remains an issue in almost every country; Denmark, one of the most liberal in history, allows most latitude here, and even Denmark proscribes child pornography. Every country (while sometimes allowing for a defence on the basis of intention or artistic merit) has its own proscription of what is “obscene” or “indecent”, and some countries are highly sophisticated in the distinctions they make between what can be displayed in public and what can be enjoyed in private. It is the modern, legal equivalent of “taboo” (which is granted an entry in the encyclopedia); and when juries decide what is obscene—whether on grounds of “reasonableness” or “community values” (as in the US, allowing degrees of difference between, and within, states) or liability “to deprave and corrupt” (as in Britain)—one might argue that this is how a modern society regulates itself on the matter of taboos. But even juries, of course, can be hostile to minority views if those views have no additional protection in law.
The history of obscenity laws is enormously complex, and touches as much on societies’ attitudes towards sexual and other mores as it does on the question of the various powers of press, public, commerce or government. This, presumably, is why the encyclopedia carries several articles that only tangentially involve censorship. The entry on “Homosexual and Lesbian Expression”, for instance, is vindicable in this context, as is the entry on Abortion in Ireland; Abortion in Britain less so (and why only these countries?). Similarly, the entry on Sadomasochism focuses almost entirely on Britain, because of the sudden criminalizing of consensual sadomasochistic play in the 1990s. There are no specific censorship issues at stake.
The article on paedophilia is slightly more relevant, since the criminal act shades constantly into the question of representations of children. The widespread fear, and visceral loathing, of paedophile crimes have had an interesting effect on legislation: it is one of the few areas of British law in which “thought crime” is created. It is illegal not only to possess or disseminate an “indecent” picture of a child, but also to create one using computer software. That is, if one creates a fake pornographic picture of a child, for one’s own consumption, although no child is harmed and no other person “corrupted” by exposure to the image, one has committed a crime; a crime that can only be defined as a perverse desire. The only other such law I can think of, in Britain, is that of treason—where even imagining the deposing of the Queen seems to be illegal under the Treason Felonies Act of 1848.
A major problem with the encyclopedia is its lack of adequate cross-referencing. Finding or chasing a topic is infuriatingly difficult. Should a reader want to know whether a name or law mentioned in one article is discussed elsewhere in greater depth, he must first use the headword list (which is printed, mercifully, in each volume), and, if there is no specific entry, find it in the index. I have not been able to work out the criteria used by the indexer; but the entries do not appear to be exhaustive, and when several citations appear, there is no way, short of looking up each in turn, to ascertain their relevance. For example, I wanted to find out if De l’Esprit by Helvétius was indeed burned. Helvétius does not have an entry; and not one of the five page references indexed under his name led to any illumination on this point. Some fuss, for no omelette.
It is perhaps a side effect of this problem that several articles overlap in the information they give, and occasionally differ slightly in what they say about the same thing. For example, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) in the United States (not indexed) appears in the “Obscenity” entry, stating that although it had been thrown out as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, an appeal was (as of May 2001) pending. In the entry for “Internet”, it states that COPA was proposed but “abandoned” (as if under pressure from activists); and in the “United States of America: Internet” entry, it isn’t mentioned at all.
However vexing these aspects of the encyclopedia might be, its content makes them far easier to forgive. The entries are generally lucid and economical (the elegance with which they treat every salient detail of a topic, often in a small space, is exemplary), as up to date as a reference book of this size can be, and the bibliographies that accompany them are impeccable.