'Free Speech'

This week in the Sunday Telegraph I read this piece by Matthew d’Ancona strongly in favour of David Cameron’s new initiative to make it harder to access violent and illegal porn on the internet.  ‘Great,’ I thought.  ‘If Dave can pull that off, he’ll get my vote’.  Then I went to the newspaper’s website and looked at some of the readers’ comments.  Hardly one had a good word to say for Cameron and his policy.  They divided pretty evenly between those who thought that it was a nice idea, but technically unfeasible (‘Cameron has no idea how the internet works’); those who thought that it was a cynically populist pre-election posture; and those who thought that it was the thin end of the wedge to bring the entire Internet under political control (‘next stop China’).

Depressing, that.  You would really think that the Prime Minister could afford the best advice on how the internet works, if anyone could.  You might also ask who is the populace that is supposed to be wooed by this populist measure, if Telegraph readers are so universally contemptuous.  (Could the PM just possibly be acting out of principle?)  And you might think that ideas about free speech have become somewhat skewed.  You might even wonder whether there are a lot of secretly porn-viewing Telegraph readers out there who aren’t admitting their real agenda, but that might be a touch paranoid.

Of course Matthew d’Ancona is a Cameron puffer, but he’s not an idiot. I think we should pay attention when he says ‘Nor is this sort of regulation in any sense a threat to free speech: those who say otherwise give a bad name to a precious ideal.  These are criminally disseminated images of criminal acts.  Shame on those who claim that their continued accessibility is the price we pay for liberty, or for the digital revolution.  That is a confusion of freedom with lawless savagery.’  That was when I threw my hat in the air, as I do when Caitlin Moran, the most unlikely Mary Whitehouse, riotously mocks porn in its own language.  When dry political commentators and down-and-dirty girls-about-town speak out against porn, it might at last undermine the dirty-mac brigade’s claims that only prudish authoritarians are whipping up ‘moral panic’ about the issue.

(Interesting how this phrase is starting to be used as a way to brush off objections and shut down debate on any sort of public vice.  As C.S. Lewis’s demon said in The Screwtape Letters, regarding ‘Puritanism’: ‘May I remark in passing that the value we have given that word is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years?  By it we have rescued annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity and sobriety of life’.  ‘Moral panic’ is rapidly becoming the equivalent for the second decade of the twenty-first century.)

However, the battle must be won on the field of culture.  Legislation can only ever be a blunt instrument, especially with such a slippery and vaguely defined enemy as porn.  With the internet, we have to grow up and learn to use it while resisting its addictive tendencies.  It’s a new medium and new media have intoxicating qualities.  The track record of humanity in coping with any of these in the first century or so is not good. 

The rise of print and mass literacy in the sixteenth century?  Every ploughboy could read his Bible: Renaissance humanism gave way to rival Christian fundamentalisms, rabble-rousing, mud-slinging and hideous religious wars all over Europe. 

The rise of the cinema and mass-circulation newspapers in the early twentieth century?  Cue manipulation of the populace by demagogues, fascism, Nuremberg rallies, and World War II.  Only when sated with destruction did people develop a healthy scepticism for what they saw on telly/read in the newspapers.

And now the rise of the internet.  Instant information, communication uncontrolled by the Establishment, marvellous.  Quack ideas, conspiracy theories, terrorist cells, child porn shared across continents with one click – not so marvellous.  This time can we ride the wave and tame the tigers?  It’s quite important.

Might return to this subject.