However, it is time to recognize that, in most countries, this phase has definitely passed. We should revisit the idea of censorship, and potentially consider it not as an unenlightened suppression of crucial ideas, but as a sincere attempt to organize the world for our benefit. The threat now is not that wonderful truths will be repressed by malign authorities, but rather that we will drown in chaos, overwhelmed by irrelevant and unhelpful trivia, unable to concentrate on what is genuinely important.
The key argument of those who attack censorship today is to claim that we need to hear all the messages. But we don't. We don't, for example, need to hear a message about what kind of perfume it would be nice to buy when taking in a great piece of urban architecture (135). There's nothing wrong with the advert itself - the problem is the location. It is depressing to the human spirit because it enacts on a large scale, in a conspicuous and prestigious place, a weakness that we know we
need to overcome in ourselves: our tendencv to distraction and inner
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A Defence of Censorship
How an idea takes on a plrysicalform.
134. Carlo Crivclli. T/jtr Annunciation, with Saint Emidius. I486
chaos. I am looking at the facade of an interesting, and rather lovely, building. Then, suddenly, I am being prompted to consider a new toiletry item. The advertisement unintentionally supports our lack of focus and attention. Things that draw us away from our best potential should not be paraded in front of us, asking for admiration. In this case, censorship would be entirely justified. It would be about taking care that the public environment should reflect, and thus comfort and support, our better natures. Censoring an incongruous billboard on the side of a much-loved building, in a city where people visit explicitly to appreciate
the architecture, is hardly controversial, but such an example reveals underlying principles that can be put to further use.
The most beautiful cities in the world are almost never produced by accident. They get to be the way they are because of rules about what you are not allowed to do, as well as what you should. The New Town of Edinburgh was built from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries by the efforts of many private speculative builders who bought plots of land and constructed houses on them (136). A magnificent and harmonious result was only achieved, however, because of a master plan indicating the line of the streets and squares and the positioning of major public buildings. There were elaborate regulations about what could be built. The houses were to be put up in a continuous line, no signposts were to project from the walls, there were rules about the height of buildings in different streets, the number of storeys they could have and the kind of stone they had to be faced with. In an Act passed in 1782, the magistrates paid special attention to roofs:
The casing of the roofs shall run along the side walls immediately above the windows of the upper storey, and no storm or other windows to be allowed in front of the roof, except skylights and that the pitch of the roof shall not be more than one third of the breadth or span over the walls.
Finally, the plans and elevations had to be approved by a committee of the Town Council, who were to be guided by the Lord Provost's demand for frontages 'not much ornamented, but with elegant simplicity', and specifically holding up the work of Robert Adam as an example of what they were looking for. The willingness to be explicit and restrictive - that is, censorious - resulted in a magnificent achievement. The rules must have been irksome to some people, but we see their point when we compare the beauties of Edinburgh with cities that have taken a more relaxed approach to collective art.
We typically think that if there is case for censorship, it should be made against extremism. If we are to ban anything, it should be images of horror and exploitation. However, the rationale for censorship is better seen in terms of the desired atmosphere of the general environment. Advocates of a so-called 'free market' complain that to restrict certain activities is to deny us freedom, but there's a distinction to be made between the freedom to allow anything to take place, from the ruin of nature to random violence, and the freedom to foster what is good. The latter may, paradoxically, require censorship. Freedom is not, despite what we are often told, a cardinal virtue across all areas of life.
A temporary monument to insensitivity.
135. Perfume Advertisement. Musee d'Orsay. Paris, 2011
The underlying issue is that we are deeply sensitive to visual stimuli. The modern world is conflicted about how much what lies in front of our eyes matters. On the one hand, it is suggested that art is an extremely important medium and that a painting no larger than a few centimetres in diameter may have a power to alter our lives. On the other hand, we are quite happy to abandon large tracts of the earth to the haste and greed of developers and assume that we will not significantly be affected by their work. Our willingness to understand harm too often stretches only to the non-visual senses. We admit the harm of air pollution, even of some kinds of noise, yet we are not at a stage when 'ugliness* is seen as an ill like any other. A politician who ran on a platform of wanting to make his or her country more beautiful would immediately be laughed off the stage. We fall back on falsely robust notions that such a priority would be fey or elitist, or accept the pernicious suggestions from developers that attractive environments cost too much. They don't, necessarily; they just require talent, a little thought, and some rules.
We should accept that the visual sensitivity we're happy to recognize and honour in our responses at the museum continue when we walk out the door. We are the same people when we have to confront an ugly assortment of buildings or negotiate a smashed-up underground station as we were when we were contemplating Giovanni Bellini's Madonna of the Meadow. If we allow that art has power to alter us for the better, we must also be aware that the opposite of art, by which we mean the opposite of the values that are embedded within good works of art, can also harm us. We cannot claim both that art will elevate us and that ugliness will leave us unaffected. The rightful celebration of freedom as an organizing principle in democracy has blinded us to an awkward truth: that freedom should, in some contexts, be limited for the sake of our wellbeing.
Television broadcasts have long been censored on grounds of violence and sexuality, and there is widespread agreement that this is an acceptable, and even welcome, restriction on liberty. We know perfectly well that extreme images are readily available elsewhere, but there is an important distinction in our minds between what people do in private and what is acceptable in public. The insight that leads us to censor images because they are too graphic or gory actually applies more broadly than the two usual categories. The problem is not primarily to do with sex or violence in themselves; our concern is really that some scenes are humiliating to our collective dignity. They give us a shameful view of human nature. Censorship is not about making it impossible to view such material; what it does is insist on the private and personal