On Censorship in Democracies D. B. Timmins, PhD Background The words censor and censorship have taken on a deeply pejorative connotation among civil libertarians in the United States. It was not always so. In all classical republics, not only of antiquity, but during the Renaissance (and more recently), the Censor, or his equivalent, played a major role as guardian of civil rights. The Roman Censor, meaning "he who takes the census", was instituted as an officer of the Republic in 443 B.C., with the duties of taking the decennial census, providing knowledge of the citizen base for taxes and military conscription -- but with the concurrent (and related) responsibility of assuring the moral and physical fitness of Romans for military service in defense of the Republic and its freedoms (a matter which seems to enter into the American equation of a fit citizenry only when a draftee turns up for physical and mental examination at the time of conscription -- rather late in the day for assuring a crop of citizens qualified to defend the freedoms of the republic). Censorship continued to play an important role during the Middle Ages, becoming even more critical in giving form to and assuring the survival of the Italian City States of the Renaissance (at least during their emerging republican period, which transmitted the notions of the ideal state to the Founders of our Republic), as well as during the Protestant Reformation. The careful vetting, especially of the reading material essential to forming the minds of children and pre-university students, continued as one of the most characteristic aspects of Colonial life in North America. Indeed, the powers of censorship are still seen as essential in time of war or national emergency. Even in peacetime, the press of most nations (except the U.S.) still imposes substantial self-censorship to preserve a sense of national unity and to avoid arousing destabilizing debate over many sensitive national policy issues. Only in the U.S. do press and TV seem to consider exposing the most explosive secrets of state, reporting in detail the most degrading sexual exploits of Hollywood stars and athletes, and broadcasting the most pornographic productions of rap musicians, as a form of competitive sport -- taking no regard at all for the long-term consequences on the moral fiber of the nation's future citizenry, or delicately crafted public or foreign policy issues. The question arises, why the notion of censorship, so long and so closely associated with positive liberal reform, the freedoms of republican government, and the spread of democracy throughout history, has become so perversely suspect in the United States of today? Ironically, it was in the Great Autocracies -- the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Pre-Revolutionary France, Stuardian England, Tsarist Russia -- where extreme license in art, literature, and the theater traditionally prevailed. Whereas democratic Switzerland, Holland, and the Young America, were the prudes and sabbath observers of the world -- in accordance with the demands of prevailing political thought and practice. It is doubly ironic that Holland and America, two nations founded upon the Puritan ethic, seem today to be the file leaders in drug use, debauchery, the spread of pornography, and moral degradation. The Thinking of a Recent Scholar on the Subject G. Homer Durham, Swarthmore PhD, Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah (later Academic Vice President of the U of U), President of Arizona State University, Utah Commissioner of Education, and eventually member of the Council of Seventy of the Mormon Church, devoted much deep thought and study to the question of the relationship between democracy, autocracy, and censorship. Because of the increasing burden of his administrative duties, Professor Durham seems never to have found time to preserve his thoughts as a paper for publication. While no one should hold Professor Durham responsible for this synthesis of his thought and findings, the following interpretation of his thinking is distilled from notes taken as a devoted student in his classes and seminars where almost forty years ago he discussed his thought and findings at length, when some of our contemporary social problems were just beginning to emerge. According to Durham, from the ancient democracies until our times, it has consistently been found by trial and (much) error that where a citizenry is responsible for giving direction to public policy through the expressed will of the majority -- either directly or through elected representatives -- the maintenance and preservation of a free society inevitably depends on an informed, virtuous, self-denying, and self-directed electorate. When voters in a democracy become too lazy or self-engrossed, to keep themselves informed on public policy issues, or where society degenerates, placing personal gain, self-indulgence, or corrupt behavior above the long-term interests of society as a whole, the state soon fails -- either through external conquest, or through falling into the hands of a domestic demagogue. Durham was a great admirer of Thomas Jefferson, and attributed to Jefferson's agreement with this reading of history, his view that if the United States were to preserve its democratic forms for more than a brief period it would have to institute deliberate measures to preserve civic virtue. It will be remembered that Jefferson placed his great hope for America's future on creating a nation of agriculturists and husbandmen, wishing to set aside the great spaces of the west for settlement by future generations of native-born Americans, rather than opening them to new immigrants from Europe. Jefferson considered that large cities, the inevitable fruit of industrialization, would become hotbeds of moral and social corruption and decay -- as they had in Europe. And that hardworking, thrifty, straight-thinking farmers must remain the backbone of American democracy, if the republic were to endure. He thus opposed Alexander Hamilton's industrialization policy and the delivery of Virginia's Western Reserve into Federal hands for rapid distribution to European immigrants. Second guessing history, while an entertaining pastime among friends, is a fruitless exercise. But it would be amusing to hear Jefferson and Hamilton repeat their great debate in the light of Twentieth Century central city crime, the war on drugs, teen age illegitimacy, drive-by shootings, terrorist bombings, and open pornography on newsstands and virtually every TV channel -- not to mention eighty-per cent of contemporary Hollywood film production. That is to say, if such an America had been able to absurvived the Civil War, the Kaiser's War, Hitler's War, and the Cold War as a quiet agrarian society. History seems to tell us that every generation must fight its own battles -- and that these will be intense and close-fought ones whatever choices made by our forefathers.. The Great Autocracies, on the other hand -- according to Durham -- could permit substantial personal license and individuality in literature and the arts because, with standing armies, secret police, and repressive machinery of state, they had little to fear from public unrest. Moreover, as such states had subjects (rather than citizens ), who played no important role in determining public policy, there was little danger of the country's running into serious problems either with regard to its foreign relations or takeover by domestic demagogues. Contemporary Events Of course there have been enormous changes since Classical Times in Greece, since the Renaissance in northern Italy, or since Colonial days in America. The U.S. is today the leading industrial nation of the world -- with only two per cent of Americans remaining on the soil, often as paid employees of corporate farming. The proportion of immigrants (and not only Europeans, but Asians, Hispanics, Africans, and Middle Easterners) is larger than at any time in history -- greater even than during the major immigration of the late Nineteenth Century -- with social critics only now beginning to question whether the early Anglo-Saxon heritage which gave shape to the first two hundred years of wonderful, if radically evolving, American democracy will be transformed in unforeseeable ways as a result of these new influences. The United States now has its own standing army, its equivalent of secret police -- and even Congress is no longer composed of financially secure citizens volunteering a few years' public service. Which legislator today views his term of office as a sacrifice of time and means, as with the Founding Fathers? Today we have a group of virtual career politicians with substantial salaries and perquisites which make their jobs highly attractive compared to most business or professional alternatives. Each Senator and each Congressman possesses an enormous staff, mailing and travel privileges, substantial speaking bonuses as a result of media recognition, and free (multiple) office privileges, which renders it 97 per cent impossible for a rival to displace him once elected. So much for Jeffersonian ideals. Still, according to Professor Durham, while Washington, more than almost any other government on earth, remains sensitive to citizen initiative and concerns, the risk of having public policy led astray by self-indulgent, demeaned, or corrupt officials, remains just as great as in ancient Athens or Rome. The only remedy is constant citizen vigilance.1 Indeed, according to Durham, the risk is perhaps greater in the modern world, given the rapid spread of fads and ideas through the print, electronic, film, and rapid transportation media -- and the potential for state control of education, transportation, and the media -- which did not exist in ancient, medieval, or colonial times. Moreover, our modern ideas of democracy place stricter limit on what we consider it appropriate for government leaders to say or do in the realm of public morality. For example in the recent congressional elections it was the kiss of death in most constituencies for a candidate to speak out too insistently on Presidential morals,- or the subject of abortion -- a felony considered too abominable to be mentioned in polite society until a brief decade or two ago; now held to be one of the "inalienable rights" of married, or unmarried, womankind -- without regard to the views or preferences of the marriage partner or the basic purpose for which society has conferred privileges on the married state -- the procreation and nurture of the next generation. What is more, American democracy does not even possess the alternative to public virtue: strong control from the top -- which was the steadying influence in the Great Autocracies, ballasting the social, moral, and artistic license we have insisted on grafting onto our democratic roots. Flagrant drug abuse, urban violence, and pornographic excess are, in the minds of a growing number, distorting the views of the rising generation with regard to the importance of personal and civic virtue as essential safeguards of the democratic process. If nothing more, this moral laxness and self-indulgence makes it more difficult for our foreign policy to attract support for concerted action from more austere societies such as those of the Arabs and Latins who place great emphasis on at least the appearance of civic morality (see the present author's paper In Praise of Hypocrisy ). 1/ Exempliefire perhaps in the near-miraculous November, 1994 election of a Republican Congress after more than forty years in the wilderness. Note added June 12, 1995 In Durham's view, it remains to be seen whether the United States can accommodate the license of the Great Autocracies with the freedom and citizen control of political process which characterized our country during its first century and a half. He attributed the extraordinary success of America in maintaining its liberties for a longer period than any other democracy in history, to the exceptional virtue and lasting influence of the Founding Generation and the civic virtue instilled in American children by the education system which prevailed until the late post-WW II period. He deplored (and was concerned by) the disappearance of civic indoctrination (words he was not reluctant to employ) in American primary education. He was of the opinion that the moralistic stories about Washington and the cherry tree, Lincoln and the ten mile walk to return the penny, The Man Without a Country, and A Message to Garcia , while perhaps not the most accurate portrayal of the facts of the incidents in question, were excellent examples of virtue to be installed in formative minds before reaching university level where some of the more questionable events of history and moral choice might appropriately be cast before minds already equipped with the facts and a moral platform from which one might deal with such equivocable issues. He held that the basic function of primary education, in addition to teaching the three "R"s, is to instill the basic values upon which a given society functions. He had no patience with those who seek to adapt the "value free" approach of higher education to the primary level. And while he recognized that there is a great deal of hypocrisy in public life, he argued that most people fully understand this, accepting it as the price which must be paid for instilling respect for democratic norms and at least the rudiments of civic virtue in youth. He felt that if history teaches us anything, it is that contrary to many Americans' simple-minded optimism, democracy is not the natural state in human affairs. The United States has been blessed by events and circumstances to be one of a mere handful of states in history (and in the modern world) which enjoy stable, democratic government (in fact, the oldest essentially unchanged government in the world), substantial civic order, and freedom of its citizenry from authoritarian harassment. If American democracy is to endure, it must be worked at. Each generation must be carefully re-instructed in respect for the essential underpinnings of self-government: personal virtue, willingness to sacrifice self-interest to the common good, considerable self-restraint, and a sense of civic duty. As Jefferson once said, "The roots of Liberty must be manured from time to time with the blood of patriots." Even more, they must be manured with a generation-to-generation and day-t-day sense of civic virtue and responsibility. Obversely, democracy must stand constant guard against vice, corruption, and self-indulgence as the banes of liberty and self-government. The Great Autocracies can perhaps permit certain license and excess: And enduring democracy, never. The Outlook -- The Risky American Experiment with the Verities of Political History Even forty years ago, Dr. Durham was expressing hope (and confidence) that, in time, the pendulum of Press, Courts, and Public Opinion would swing, recognizing these simple home truths of history (which are in truth perhaps not so simple -- who studies history anymore? And which are certainly taught in all too few homes -- or primary schools, today), which have been accepted by most of the great political thinkers throughout the ages. Never before has a nation experienced the same combination of liberty and license as the contemporary United States. The question in Dr. Durham's mind, was whether and for how long these two incompatibles could continue to function in the same society. Neither he, nor the present writer, suggest instituting a formal office of censor in the United States, as in wartime (though, arguably, given the current state of events, such a case might be made). There is no place for such control in a modern, peacetime, Great Democracy. Rather, he hoped that society at large would eventually come to recognize and accept the essentiality of self-limits to the degrading and potentially politically self-destructive excesses which threaten the very freedom which has permitted the current excesses which characterize today's music, films, literature, and the behavior of athletic stars. And that the lawyers and judges who staff our court systems would better inform themselves about political theory and world history, again permitting states and towns the opportunity to apply local standards and local solutions to what the Founders saw as local problems not delegated to the federal level -- the genius of the American system -- in deciding what are acceptable expressions of art, music, film, and literature (and perhaps even the limits of a pregnant woman's rights, if any, to terminate a pregnancy once she -- and another -- have decided to indulge in unprotected sex).1 1 One wonders how Dr. Durham would view the irate media reaction to just such a call for media-self censorship in the interest of preserving the integrity of America's youth made by a contemporary candidate for the Presidency of the United States, not to mention the current impeachment proceedings.