Censorship and the stupidification of a nation

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Paris-based media rights watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, has listed Australia along with Iran and North Korea in a report on countries that pose a threat of internet censorship. So, another one bites the dust. Join the club. This is how it all begins. Been there, done that, wearing the T-shirt.

Censorship always provokes extreme emotional responses. Proponents deflect it by, self-righteously frothing in the mouth, arguing Asian (or any such) values. But Kamasutra is also banned in this country. Well, so much for that. Or maybe they think it comes from Europe.

The opponents can go on and on about freedom of speech and human rights, which are not noble thoughts and arguments, but mean nothing in the face of naked power. I was once persuaded to attend a meeting on censorship organised by a local NGO, and managed to piss off almost everyone. "Look, I have heard plenty about human rights and freedom of speech and all that today," I said. "You really don't need to convince me. I belong to the converted. You have to decide how you'd preach to the unconverted, explain to them why freedom of speech is better than censorship."

So, is freedom of speech better than censorship?

To quote US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (not that I consider the US to be a paragon in respect of either human rights or freedom of speech -- censorship takes many insidious forms), "... ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market ..."

In other words: every idea has a right to exist, and has to be allowed to exist and compete freely with other views, particularly the entrenched ones, in a marketplace of ideas. While the benefit of this to the individual and to the country is obvious, why should naked power care? If one were the incumbent, why would, or should, one care about any view other than one's own, even if it is better, particularly if it threatens one's position of power?

John Stuart Mills, in his essay On Liberty, is clearer. "The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

So, censorship is a lose-lose proposition. In short, it robs the nation and its people of the benefit of new ideas. Nothing can explain it more clearly than the case of Galileo (although there are thousands of other examples). Stephen Hawking says, "Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science." Galileo's unstinting support of Copernicus heliocentric theory (which many other chicken-shit philosophers and physicist of the time supported, but dared not speak out in support), which was in direct opposition to the geocentric view held by the church, earned him a date with the inquisition and lifelong house arrest. But, if it weren't for the likes of him we would, certainly, never have had the iPhone.

Still, it does not solve the power equation. There are long-term benefits of free speech, certainly, but why should one care if one were in power, for surely one would have no desire to lose it? Why should one not simply let the country rot, as long as one can enrich oneself? There are enough examples of that in the world today.

Bertrand Russell wrote (okay, I confess, he was my schoolboy hero, and I was a nerd, but I also read Batman): "An attitude of obedience, when it is exacted from subordinates, is inimical to intelligence. In a community in which men have to accept, at least outwardly, some obviously absurd doctrine, the best men must become either stupid or disaffected. There will be in consequence, a lowering of intellectual level, which must, before long, interfere with technical progress. This is especially true when the official creed is one which few intelligent men can honestly accept."

He said further: "The Nazis have exiled most of their ablest Germans, and this must, sooner or later, have disastrous effects on their military technique." Now, this was written before the start of the Second World War. We all know what happened after that.

In the sixties our universities were world-class, the pride of the developing world, among the best in Asia. Now, we struggle to be counted. Students, those who can afford to, go overseas. They don't even want to consider attending a local one if they can help it, whatever the quota. As for the quality of the graduates, one need only ask our employers. Since the eighties we have lost thousands of our skilled workers overseas, not for reasons of economics, but due to real or imagined sense of injustice and an intolerable climate of intellectual asphyxiation. We have lost the battle to attract the life saving FDI because our workers are no longer considered competitive. Our civil service is constantly in the press, fire-fighting the results of poor decision-making. We hear of police confiscating books from shops one day, and ministers promoting reading the next. Even our football team is languishing. It is as if thinking itself has been outlawed.

Some may point to the eighties when civil servants were told to sit up, shut up, and punch clocks, when we sacrificed our young at the altar of Mammon for some to get unbelievably rich, when bad news was banned, when argument and debate ended, and when wisdom flowed from only one source. It was the end of dissent, the end of thought.

Now the high points in our life include talking about roti canai tossing competitions in Subang Jaya and teh tarik experiments in outer space. Oh yes, we also have a committee for winning Nobel Prizes.

Stupidification is not a condition, it is a process. We are not born stupid, but we can get there if we try hard enough.

Censorship by harassment

"... there is a widespread belief that doctrinal uniformity is essential to national strength," Bertrand Russell wrote in his treatise on power in 1938. But he also said, "... the most successful nations, throughout modern times, have been those least addicted to the persecution of heretics."

I remember reading these years ago when I was in school, and I wondered if Russell's views can somehow be proven wrong, without anyone noticing, that is. In Malaysia, 'book police' are back in the news after a short absence. Interestingly, this has happened very soon after Sister in Islam (SIS) won its court battle over the 'banning' of one of its books. Sorry for the cynicism, but one cannot help but wonder. It could be a coincidence, of course, but Malaysia does have a pretty long track record for 'censorship by harassment'.

Censorship is probably as old as writing itself, but it took on a whole new dimension from the 12th to the 16th century in Europe. Basically, reading was outlawed to all but the clerics since they were the only ones allowed to interpret the Bible. Lay people were lay people, sheep, or rakyat, not endowed with enough intelligence to make any decision for themselves. With the invention of the Gutenberg press and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, things really came to a head. In theory, any lay person who could read, or was suspected of being able to do so, or, god forbid, be in possession of a Bible, was arrested, imprisoned, tortured and/or killed by various methods including being burnt at the stake, hanged, drawn and quartered, pulled apart by horses, drowned, impaled, and several other creative means. In reality, many were political opponents, or those who had gone out of favour, or merely casualties of random victimisation. By some estimates, 9 million people lost their lives, and many more -- presumably those who repented -- were left lame.

We all know how that ended. 'Censorship through terror' did not work then, and never has. Throughout history, 'book police' have always lost. But that does not seem to stop them.

Certainly, our own home grown variety of 'book police' are not quite that crude. Some years ago, we put up a list of so-called banned books on our website, 'so-called' because many were not actually banned by the Ministry. We do not know what actually happened in the background after that, but we can guess. All of a sudden there was a deafening silence from every direction; book distributors refused talk to us, especially about that dreaded 'b' list. It was as if omerta, a code of silence, had come into force. Many books we wanted to order became unavailable. Many distributors refused to import books for us, even if we paid them in advance, particularly if it had a 'banned' word in the title, or on the possibility that cover design could offend one ultra-sensitive individual living in Batang Berjuntai, or somewhere. (No prizes for guessing the words.)

The recent confiscation of multiple copies of several titles from bookshops around the country is interesting. Firstly these books have been in the market for over a year and anyone who wants one has already bought it. It could be another case of closing the stable doors after the horses have gone, something we do have a track record for. Or, it could be something more sinister.

Why do enforcement officers -- what an ostentatious name, indeed -- need to take multiple copies of a book if they only want to 'read them' for anything prejudicial to the security of the country, even if they say please. Wouldn't one copy do? Couldn't they get one from the publishers?

Recently, several copies of the first two titles were taken from one outlet of a chain stores on grounds that the books might have 'suspicious content'. A memo went out to its other outlets to have them all to be removed from the shelves. Diabolical, but effective. The bookstore will get a credit note from the distributor, who will in turn get one from the publisher. And the bookstore will, in future, be very hesitant to sell other titles by the same authors, or from the 'offending' publisher. (Remember the Salman Rushdie incident: although only one title is officially banned, all others have become endangered species in the country.) Why bother to ban books and have that gazette challenged in court, when this is so much more effective?

Inquiries are probabley a waste of time, omerta might already be in force.