Slouching Towards Gomorrah (23 page)

That will certainly happen, but the presence of wholesome films and files does not rule out the presence of the corrupt and even diabolical. The Internet is proving that. The more private viewing becomes, the more likely it is that salacious and perverted tastes will be indulged. That proposition is demonstrated by the explosion of pornographic films and profits when videocassettes enabled customers to avoid the embarrassment of entering “adult” theaters. An even greater surge in the demand for perverted sex with violence will certainly occur when customers don’t even have to check cassettes out of a store. Calling up films in their own homes, they will not have to face a clerk or let other customers see them browsing through x-rated films.

When digital films become available for viewing on home computers, we are likely to discover that Gilders “trolls of cyberspace” are very real, very popular, and a very great menace. Imagine Internet’s alt.sex.stories on digital film available on home computers anywhere in the world. The dramatization, in living color with lurid special effects, of men castrating and then shooting a 6-year-old boy, then gang raping and killing a 7-year-old
girl, is certain to trigger imitations by borderline perverts. Don’t think such films won’t be made; they will. Don’t think that they will not be defended on First Amendment grounds; they will. And don’t suppose it will not be said that the solution is simple: if you don’t like it, don’t watch it. That, too, will be argued.

A great many people are willing to deplore such material but unwilling to take or allow action to stop its distribution. When the Senate Commerce Committee approved a proposal to impose criminal penalties on anyone who transmits on Internet material that is “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent,” ferocious opposition immediately developed from a coalition of business and civil liberties organizations. The wording of the bill leaves much to be desired, but that is not the primary objection these groups have. They do not want restrictions, period, no matter how carefully drawn. The coalition includes, of course, the ACLU and the ubiquitous Time Warner, which John Leo has said is “associated one way or another with most of the high-profile, high-profit acts, black and white, that are pumping nihilism into the culture…. We are living through a cultural collapse, and major corporations are presiding over that collapse and grabbing everything they can on the way down.“
³⁰

We are still on the way down and they are still grabbing. I do not suppose for a moment that Time Warner would produce films of the material to be found on the Internet’s alt.sex. Nor would any major entertainment corporation. Not today or tomorrow, but as we grow accustomed to brutal and perverted sex, inhibitions will be lowered still further. Some businesses will make such films and some civil libertarians will deplore them, adding, of course, that they should not be banned. In the absence of restraints of some sort, however, everything that can be imagined, and some things that can’t, yet, will eventually be produced and shown.

Reflecting on where we have come, Maggie Gallagher wrote: “Sex was remade in the image of Hugh Hefner; Eros demoted from a god to a buffoon. Over the last thirty years, America transformed itself into a pornographic culture.“
³¹
Gallagher accepted Angela Carter’s definition, stated in somewhat more basic Anglo-Saxon, that pornography is basically propaganda for fornication, and offered a definition of her own: “[A] pornographic culture is not one in which pornographic materials are published and distributed.
A pornographic culture is one which accepts the ideas about sex on which pornography is based.“
³²

That is quite right, as far as it goes, but our popular culture has gone far beyond propagandizing for fornication. That seems almost innocent nowadays. What America increasingly produces and distributes is now propaganda for every perversion and obscenity imaginable. If many of us accept the assumptions on which that is based, and apparently many do, then we are well on our way to an obscene culture. The upshot is that American popular culture is in a free fall, with the bottom not yet in sight. This is what the liberal view of human nature has brought us to. The idea that men are naturally rational, moral creatures without the need for strong external restraints has been exploded by experience. There is an eager and growing market for depravity, and profitable industries devoted to supplying it. Much of such resistance as there is comes from people living on the moral capital accumulated by prior generations. That capital may be expected to dwindle further—cultures do not unravel everywhere all at once. Unless there is vigorous counterattack, which must, I think, resort to legal as well as moral sanctions, the prospects are for a chaotic and unhappy society, followed, perhaps, by an authoritarian and unhappy society.

The question is whether we are really content to accept that.

8

T
he destruction of standards is inherent in radical individualism, but it could hardly have been accomplished so rapidly or so completely without the assistance of the American judiciary. Wielding a false modern liberal version of the First Amendment, the courts have destroyed laws that created pockets of resistance to vulgarity and obscenity.

Sooner or later censorship is going to have to be considered as popular culture continues plunging to ever more sickening lows. The alternative to censorship, legal and moral, will be a brutalized and chaotic culture, with all that that entails for our society, economy, politics, and physical safety. It is important to be clear about the topic. I am
not
suggesting that censorship should, or constitutionally could, be employed to counter the liberal political and cultural propagandizing of movies, television, network news, and music. They are protected, and properly so, by the First Amendments guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press. I
am
suggesting that censorship be considered for the most violent and sexually explicit material now on offer, starting with the obscene prose and pictures available on the Internet, motion pictures that are mere rhapsodies to violence, and the more degenerate lyrics of rap music.

Censorship is a subject that few people want to discuss, not
because it has been tried and found dangerous or oppressive but because the ethos of modern liberalism has made any interference with the individuals self-gratification seem shamefully reactionary. Dole, Bennett, Tucker, and Leo, while denouncing some of the worst aspects of popular culture, were all quick to protest that they were not for censorship. That may be a tactical necessity, at least at this stage of the debate, since it has become virtually a condition of intellectual and social respectability to make that disclaimer. And it is true that there are a variety of actions short of censorship that should be tried. One is to organize boycotts of the other products sold by corporations that market filth. But what happens if a corporation decides it prefers the bottom line to responsibility? What happens if the company does not market other products that can be boycotted? So long as there exists a lucrative market for obscenity, somebody will supply it. That brings us back to “And then what?“

Is censorship really as unthinkable as we all seem to assume? That it is unthinkable is a very recent conceit. From the earliest colonies on this continent over 300 hundred years ago, and for about 175 years of our existence as a nation, we endorsed and lived with censorship. We do not have to imagine what censorship might be like; we know from experience. Some of it was formal, written in statutes or city ordinances; some of it was informal, as in the movie producers’ agreement to abide by the rulings of the Hayes office. Some of it was inevitably silly—the rule that the movies could not show even a husband and wife fully dressed on a bed unless each had one foot on the floor—and some of it was no doubt pernicious. The period of Hayes office censorship was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the golden age of the movies.

The questions to be considered are whether such material has harmful effects, whether it is constitutionally possible to censor it, and whether technology may put some of it beyond society’s capacity to control it.

It is possible to argue for censorship, as Stanley Brubaker, a professor of political science, does,
¹
on the ground that in a republican form of government where the people rule, it is crucial that the character of the citizenry not be debased. By now we should have gotten over the liberal notion that its citizens’ characters are none of the business of government. The government ought not
try to impose virtue, but it can deter incitements to vice. “Liberals have always taken the position,” the late Christopher Lasch wrote, “that democracy can dispense with civic virtue. According to this way of thinking, it is liberal institutions, not the character of citizens, that make democracy work.“
²
He cited India and Latin America as proof that formally democratic institutions are not enough for a workable social order, a proof that is disheartening as the conditions in parts of large American cities approach those of the Third World.

Lasch stressed “the degree to which liberal democracy has lived off the borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism.“
³
Certainly, the great religions of the West—Christianity and Judaism—taught moral truths about respect for others, honesty, sexual fidelity, truth-speaking, the value of work, respect for the property of others, and self-restraint. With the decline of religious influence, the moral lessons attenuate as well. Morality is an essential soil for free and democratic governments. A people addicted to instant gratification through the vicarious (and sometimes not so vicarious) enjoyment of mindless violence and brutal sex is unlikely to provide such a soil. A population whose mental faculties are coarsened and blunted, whose emotions are few and simple, is unlikely to be able to make the distinctions and engage in the discourse that democratic government requires.

I find Brubaker and Lasch persuasive. We tend to think of virtue as a personal matter, each of us to choose which virtues to practice or not practice—the privatization of morality, or, if you will, the “pursuit of happiness,” as each of us defines happiness. But only a public morality, in which trust, truth-telling, and self-control are prominent features, can long sustain a decent social order and hence a stable and just democratic order. If the social order continues to unravel, we may respond with a more authoritarian government that is capable of providing at least personal safety.

There is, of course, more to the case for censorship than the need to preserve a viable democracy. We need also to avoid the social devastation wrought by pornography and endless incitements to murder and mayhem. Whatever the effects upon our capacity to govern ourselves, living in a culture that saturates us
with pictures of sex and violence is aesthetically ugly, emotionally flattening, and physically dangerous.

There are, no doubt, complex causes for illegitimacy and violence in today’s society, but it seems impossible to deny that one cause is the messages popular culture insistently presses on us. Asked about how to diminish illegitimacy, a woman who worked with unmarried teenage mothers replied tersely: “Shoot Madonna.” That may be carrying censorship a bit far, but one sees her point. Madonna’s forte is sexual incitement. We live in a sex-drenched culture. The forms of sexual entertainment rampant in our time are overwhelming to the young, who would, even without such stimulations, have difficulty enough resisting the song their hormones sing. There was a time, coinciding with the era of censorship, when most did resist.

Young males, who are more prone to violence than females or older males, witness so many gory depictions of killing that they are bound to become desensitized to it. We now have teenagers and even subteenagers who shoot if they feel they have been “dissed” (shown disrespect). Indeed, the newspapers bring us stories of murders done for simple pleasure, the killing of a stranger simply because the youth felt like killing someone, anyone. That is why, for the first time in American history, you are more likely to be murdered by a complete stranger than by someone you know. That is why our prisons contain convicted killers who show absolutely no remorse and frequently cannot even remember the names of the persons they killed.