Wednesday 7 March 2018

Politically-correct censorship is a trivial issue when people have nothing substantive to communicate

Politically-correct censorship continues to grow - although it is far from new.

Wholesale censorship of public discourse to advance the Left agenda began in a big way in the 1960s in fields such as intelligence and immigration - and this has since extended into the private and personal domains, and shifted from negative-taboos to mandatory propaganda.

(Anyone who is not explicitly, actively, publicly, for the Left agenda is treated as being actively-against it. Now, not to love Leftism, and to communicate that love repeatedly and without limit - is to "hate" it. hence the invention and enforcement of 'hate crimes' and the significance of endemic accusations of hate.) 

Honesty is now impossible in many areas of public discourse. Left-censorship has done its work - and some.

But - Left censorship is pushing an open door - because hardly anybody even wants to be honest. And sees no need to be honest; since communication is not about reality but about... well, mostly it's about feelings. 


More significantly, in a post-God, post-Christian, anti-Christian world - there is no compelling reason for honesty; since at best 'truth' is merely expedient - a means towards the end of greater pleasure and less suffering.


Anyway... It is not censorship that is bad - but the fact that censorship is being used for evil ends.

When it comes to the current increase in Leftist censorship, it is the Leftism that is evil, not the censorship.

Until the fact of Leftist evil is recognised as a fact; PC censorship will continue to grow, as it has done for two generations.


But how can Leftism Now be recognised as evil when - for modern mainstream people - there is no such thing as evil?

For modern people, evil has no reality because Good has no reality - both are equally a matter of opinion - that is, of ephemeral feelings; and feelings are something that can - nowadays - be shaped and reversed with trivial ease.


As often, as always, present evil trends will continue until modern people awaken to God; because without God there is no compelling reason to oppose evil trends - especially when evil is packaged as cool, amusing, entertaining, convenient; and as ultimately heralding a virtual world better much than the real thing (nicer, with more pleasure, less pain).

That is what the (objectively-evil) Global Establishment  are 'promising' - and for the typical two-dimensional modern materialist, censorship is merely one part of the Virtual Paradise Package Deal, on which they pin their hopes.


And all that we personally have to do - is to trust the devil to deliver on his promises.




4 comments:

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Leftism is bad, of course, but censorship is still bad in and of itself. Censorship as such is an impediment to honesty, at least when it is the content of speech (particular facts or opinions) that is being censored, as opposed to the mode of expression (four-letter words, pictures of Muhammad, and such).

Bruce Charlton said...

@WmJas - It entirely depends on what is being censored, by whom and with what aim. All decent human society - all *good* human society - restricts what can be said and how. Language is an act just as much as a physical blow or caress - it can never be indiscriminate, we can never be indifferent to it.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Perhaps I am using the word "censorship" more narrowly than you are. Certainly speech can and should be regulated in order to discourage fraud, perjury, defamation, harassment, copyright infringement, violation of privacy, obscenity, incitement to crime, the leaking of legitimate secrets, and so on.

Political censorship and the like is what I have in mind -- regulations that would require anyone to misrepresent their sincere opinions about matters of fact. To the extent that censorship requires dishonesty, it is evil in itself, though I suppose one could argue that it is in some cases a necessary evil which must be tolerated in the service of a greater good. I am very leery of such arguments, since like you I regard honesty as an absolute duty. "Freedom of expression" in an artistic or emotional sense is not an absolute right, but the right to be honest is, and that distinction dictates which forms of censorship I consider potentially legitimate. Banning the display of the swastika or hammer-and-sickle, fine; banning "Holocaust denial," absolutely unacceptable. Banning racial slurs, fine; banning discussion of racial differences, no.

Bruce Charlton said...

@WmJas - It is characteristic of the current evil censorship that it dishonestly denies itself.

For example, Only one set of views are allowed, and any other views are prohibited on the false grounds that they are necessarily motivated by hate. In science, issues are described (in public discourse) as *settled*, when in fact oppositional views are being excluded and/ or punished (eg. global warming; heritable race differences; nature, causes and consequences of sex and sexuality).

It is hard to imagine a way in which censorship could be done honestly in the modern world - yet the opposite view of a kind of 'free for all' in mass public media is also extremely harmful... The situation seems impossible (as well as undesirable) to sustain.

As I have remarked elsewhere, I find myself being forced into a conclusion that modernity - the kind of society of the past couple of centuries - is intrinsically and necessarily evil.

Yet, equally (for me) it is undesirable as well as impossible for us to return to pre-modern conditions - since we now *know* they also are intrinsically permeated with a different set of evils...

We cannot continue, we cannot go back - something unprecedented must therefore be coming (for good or ill, depending on the motivations of people). Maybe it will be the de facto destruction of human-ness (techno-totalitarianism) or a small scale kind of society. Both possibilities presuppose a collosal die-off of most living humans...

I don't know. I don't think we need to know. We need to do the right things (mainly, think the right thoughts), and see what happens.