In praise of censorship - government and the arts

Public Interest, Wntr, 1994 by Stanley C. Brubaker

With this understanding of man, liberalism has accomplished much. It has tamed religious fanaticism. It has redirected tyrannical drives for conquest into productive quests for commerce. It has liberated much of mankind from slavery, penury, disease, and prejudice. It has extended more prosperity and material comfort to far more people than any form of government in history. It has indeed created the conditions for happiness in a way that is unparalleled.

Yet something is missing. And we get a livelier sense of what that is by noting that Enlightenment liberalism, although it does not sanction censorship, does authorize book burning--of a sort. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume wrote with audacity of the import of this new understanding of nature and of knowledge. In short, it made nonsense of what had previously guided mankind in philosophy, theology, and art. Consider the last paragraph of this essay:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

In this book burning, there is no fanaticism. It's done more in a bourgeois spirit of tidying up the place--getting rid of the rubbish in order to make room for the useful, for the peaceful pursuit of commerce. With such a library, we have to ask, does liberalism provide a home fit for man? To answer that, we should look to two challenges to Enlightenment liberalism: classical republicanism, which preceded liberalism, and against which liberalism revolted, and postmodernism, which has followed it.

Classical republicanism

The liberal vision of politics was not unknown to classical political philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Their failure to embrace it has nothing to do, as is often thought, with historical "progress" of some sort--that later generations could see possibilities they could not. Instead, it represents their reasoned judgment of what constitutes a political community. For Plato and Aristotle, the liberal vision is fundamentally deficient exactly because it does not account for distinctive characteristics of man, those which lead man to political life and transpolitical aspirations. In the Republic, for instance, Plato describes the city concerned exclusively with the goods of the body as a city of pigs.

For the ancients, politics is inevitably concerned with the elevation, the ennoblement of mankind. Man may be driven to communal life in significant part, as the liberals argued, by necessity, for mere life. But the community persists and develops for the sake of the good life, that is, for human happiness, not merely the pursuit of happiness. And at the core of happiness is excellence of the soul. Republican government must summon forth such qualities of soul as courage, moderation, obedience to law, shame at what is ignoble, reverence for what is noble; and especially from its leaders, such a polity requires noble ambition, public spiritedness, practical wisdom, and judgment. These qualities are needed by the polity; in that sense the virtues are useful. But they are also good in and of themselves; they form the core of human happiness. Thus, republican virtues are not merely useful; they are also fine. And this excellence of the human soul, visible in political life, points beyond itself to realms of life that are transpolitical, to a life of self-reflection and understanding, to philosophy and the fine arts.