I thank you all for your help.
The thread about child molesters contains parts about self censorship, having thoughts but not acting on them. Why is that a good idea, but other censorship is bad?
Who gets to be the censors?
It’s useful having vile, disgusting, degrading works that define the outer limits of permissible speech. It insures that the boundary of what is disallowed is set far, far away from less extreme works of clear artistic merit.
I’d rather the fight over censorship be fought over *Hogg *than Lolita.
Because self-censorship is self-control, and other censorship is conrolling other people, which means that other people might try to control us. And we don’t trust them to always have a good idea of what’s “good”.
Makes sense.
I have to go out and do chores now, before it gets too cold. I will check in later.
I didn’t read through the other thread, so I’m not sure exactly what you are getting at. My take just on the above are that there is a difference between self imposed censorship (which we all do in one way or another for things we find distasteful) and those arbitrarily imposed ON us from the government or some other authority. No matter how ‘free’ the press, there is always going to be the need to impose some level of censorship. In the US we have several subjects that are taboo and thus subject to both censorship and criminal charges (child pornography, for instance).
To me, such censorship has to be carefully thought out and rationally implemented, because the possibility of abuse or of it becoming a slippery slope is high. Think it through. While you may not think that this book is worthwhile and thus needs to be banned, where does it stop? What happens if the next subject decided on for banning ‘in the public’s good’ is something you DO have an interest in, or that you don’t feel should be banned? That’s the trouble with starting such things…you don’t really know where they might end.
-XT
But that’s talking about actions–about having thoughts but not actually going out and doing things to other people.
Reading the description of this book, there are certainly things in it that we would not and ought not permit people to do in real life (and I don’t even know that the author of the book would disagree with that). But people make books, movies, comic strips, and other works of fiction that include descriptions of made up murder and other anti-social mayhem all the time.
Going out and actually doing things to real-life people affects other human beings; if the things you do to them are bad things that infringe on their rights, you’ve harmed another person. Writing about doing bad things to fictional characters (or about fictional characters doing bad things to other fictional characters) doesn’t actually affect anyone except for those people who voluntarily choose to read or watch the fiction you’ve created.
Okay, okay, enough already, I’ll do it. Yeesh.
Now does one have to apply to be the God King Emperor of Humanity or do I have to rig a lottery or something?
Depends. Do you have an saucer with anti-grav, a plasma cannon, HVM’s and a switchblade and seriously bad attitude? If so then I’d go with ‘whatever you want’…
-XT
I vote that we ban all works of scripture. I don’t like 'em, so that’ll be fine with everyone, right?
Animals fed and outbuildings closed up.
The biotoxin part was an attempt to work from agreement ala Carnage.
We agree on something and then work forward till we disagree, therefore making clear the source of disagreement.
But alot of people like scripture. They are not in the same class as Hogg.
You would have a real problem convincing a majority that they are valueless.
How many like that book we are talking about, and should a few demented souls have a say?
And yet we exert social pressure on certain groups of people (in the case of pedophilia, very forcefully) to STFU. It is a huge jump from “I don’t like pedophiles” to “the vast majority of folks here just wish you pedophiles would shut up,” but only a small step from there to “we should legislate against pedophilic speech.” Social pressure may differ from censorship, but only by degree, not kind.
Perhaps we prefer to force other people to self-censor, and thus keep our hands clean. We’d like to directly silence ideas we don’t like, and use social pressure to accomplish the same thing, but it looks so brutal and uncivilized.
Sure, right now there are lots of religious people around - but there have been times and places when they were successfully minimized and oppressed. Book banning doesn’t look quite as enticing when you realize that it’s not a given that you’ll always be on top.
And anyway, I could ban the religious books peicemeal. I could get away with banning everything but the bible, right? And how about those non-king-james translations, or whichever ones aren’t as widespread - heresy! Shred 'em. I could do that, right?
It is indeed a slippery slope, and we’re not entirely off of it. However, literary censorship is* a tempting target, because it’s been relatively easy to shut down the sources of distribution. Being easy to pull off makes it tempting to do frivolously, in a way that things that require massive police efforts don’t.
- this is probably less of a factor now that digital distribution is possible, but I doubt it’s entirely an non-factor yet.
If that’s your criteria, I will submit American Idols and all its international variants. And whatever On Ice.
I’ll reduce it to this: how would the world be better off without that book?
Sorry, I have to make the obligatory Tom Lehrer reference here:
<Tom>
Stories of tortures,
Used by debauchers,
Lurid, licentious and vile;
Make me smile.
</Tom>
There are three levels of filters here. The first is the filter that we all use to select that tiny fraction of books we have time to read. No problem there. The second is that a publisher and editor decide that enough people want to read a book to make it economically feasible to publish. In this case, they decided that it was. If no one does the writer can self-publish - do you object to that also? Delany is a good enough writer, and respected enough, that the publisher clearly thought there was a market. Me, I’ve never even dared Dhalgren yet.
The final filter is the government saying that no one can see the book. Is that what you want?
Besides those people who enjoy what he wrote (and being at work I don’t even want to find out what it is) anyone doing critical research on Delany might be interested in this book as input on what makes him tick. So that is a non-perverted set of readers right there.
Sure, I would let you do that.
I guess I am looking more to understand the willingness to say that we need the most foul, dispicable ideas set down on paper.
Ok, no one has to read them.
I would like to think we could focus on what is good and healthy.
You’re assuming that anybody who reads a book like *Hogg *is only doing so to get off on it. But different people will have different experiences with the same text. Some demented individuals might read *Hogg *for sensual pleasure, but others might read it because they WANT to be shocked and horrified. Censorship isn’t just wrong from a utilitarian perspective, but also from an aesthetic one – it denies the creative agency involved in the act of reading and insists that any work only has one privileged interpretation.
The Bible condones slavery, rape, and genocide. And also the eternal torture of those who don’t believe in Jesus. If we’re using any objective criteria of value here, instead of just arbitrary popular whim, we’re better off without it.
That’s the problem with putting every book up for a popular vote. The majority can be, and often are wrong. History has shown that quite amply. What if the Southern States had the power to ban “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” because it made slave owners uncomfortable?