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232 °C
Censorship in the World Today
Author's Notes: I find it quite amusing that after all_japan_comp, I've been completely burned out with regards to creative writing. And in fact, the worthiest piece of writing that's come out of me since then is an essay of 2000-odd words on censorship, using Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 as a starting point of analysis. So, for a lark, I shall just post it here anyway.


232 °C
Censorship in the World Today

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So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 cleverly approaches the issue of censorship through subverting the traditional role of the fireman as a preserver of lives and property. In Bradbury’s dystopic future, a fireman is a destroyer. To him, ‘It was a pleasure to burn.’

What does he burn?

In a future where houses have been completely fireproofed, the fireman burns books. And in the flicker of the flames and the fearsome tang of kerosene, ideas are scorched and thought perishes in the furnace. Humanity is melted down to its basest instincts.

This terrifying vision was written five decades ago, yet the issue of censorship that it addresses still remains pertinent today. In the words of the book, ‘our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities stressed and upset.’

Similarly to Fahrenheit, we have our minorities too. We have minorities, civil groups, majorities, governments, societies, even whole civilizations. All these groups interact on a day to day basis and tensions cannot be avoided. If the motive for censorship is the greater stability and peace of society, do we then control and suppress speech and expression? Do we metaphorically, if not literally, burn books?

The compelling vision that Bradbury paints for us answers with a resounding ‘no’.

Despite this, however, the fact is that censorship is still present in today’s world today. There are many instances where offending texts have been censored by the offended party, be it the government, the minority, or the majority. Even in a country as democratic and as liberal as the United Kingdom, censorship still occurs. In the December of 2004, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre closed down a play entitled Behzti (Dishonor), written by a young Sikh woman. Why? Because the play touched on a rising trend that the Sikh community preferred not to discuss – that traditional principles upheld by the Sikh faith are more often by not left by the wayside in favour of outward appearance, wealth and power.

What is particularly discouraging about this incident is that the author and the theatre had actually consulted the Sikh community before the play went on, allowing for peaceful protest, but making it clear that the play would not be censored or banned. Most of the community agreed to this, but a significant minority resorted to serious violence, which included shouting abuse, throwing bricks through windows, and terrifying the audience in the foyer. They also abused the playwright physically and verbally, even harassing her family. Eventually both the moderates in the Sikh community and the theatre bowed to the pressure, and the play closed.

Fahrenheit foresaw this before it actually happened. In a proleptic foretelling, Beatty the Chief Burner tells our protagonist, the fireman turned anti-establishment renegade Guy Montag – ‘Empty the theatres save for clowns and furnish the room with glass walls and pretty colours running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne.’

In today’s world, knowledge has also been censored. Take for instance China and the censorship of search engines to exclude websites of outlawed groups such as Falun Gong, or Taiwan Independence, or websites that contain taboo topics, such as police brutality, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, and democracy. The list does not end there. It continues with blocking websites that have user content, including Blogspot and Wikipedia.

Similarly, knowledge – ‘slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology’ – is dead in the world of Fahrenheit. In school, students get ‘an hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports’. Thought is discouraged – people are ‘crammed full’ of ‘incombustible data’, ‘damned full of facts’, so that ‘they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving’. But Bradbury makes it clear to us that this supposed knowledge is nothing but an illusion.

But what is the reason for this banning of knowledge and of thought? The reason proposed to the readers is happiness. The reason is peace and stability. Thinking is bad, because ‘that way lies melancholy’. If trying to ‘measure and equate the universe [makes] man feel bestial and lonely’, then forget it. ‘Bring on your clubs and parties … your acrobats and magicians … your sex and heroin … more of everything to do with automatic reflex… Pleasure…Titillation.’ Vacuity is the default mode of existence for most of the people in Fahrenheit. ‘Intellectual’ has become ‘the swear word it deserved to be’.

The dystopia of Fahrenheit 451 is based on one central principle: ‘We must all be alike’. The United States Constitution says that all are born free and equal, but that is not enough. In Fahrenheit, everyone is made free and equal. ‘Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.’

In fact, Fahrenheit is not the only book to touch on this topic, this mistaken assumption that being the same will make us all happy. Brave New World portrays it in the rigid structuring of society into classes of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. That too, is a dystopia which is disrupted with the introduction of an old-world Savage into the story – ironically, a Savage who quotes Shakespeare and cannot comprehend the mindless, pleasure-seeking instinct that drives the people in Brave New World.

George Orwell’s 1984 similarly deals with a world where a person is first and foremost an extension of the totalitarian government known only as the Party, where citizens have no right to a personal life or a personal thought. ‘Big Brother Is Watching You’, indeed.

But is this truly equality? Is this truly freedom? Is this what we want?

Like Montag, the protagonist of Fahrenheit, we rebel against this saccharine approximation of happiness. Montag becomes the person we identify the most with, because he too rejects the system, if a bit confusedly and haphazardly. We understand him as he feels ‘his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin [like] a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing, now blown out’. We empathise when he admits to himself that ‘he was not happy.’

Similarly, Madeleine L’Engle sums it up very well in the words of her character Meg, from the children’s book A Wrinkle in Time (similarly possessed of its own dystopic society, Camazotz, where everyone is literally alike). It may be true that ‘nobody is ever unhappy’, but then ‘maybe if you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t know how to be happy’.

We all want to be happy. But we certainly do not want to be unhappy. Nonetheless, you can only have one with the other. The same concept applies to censorship. We all want freedom and the right to self-expression. We certainly do not want to be offended by an opposing point of view. But nonetheless, to quote Voltaire’s Essay on Tolerance, "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too." There is also another saying, also attributed to Voltaire – ‘I may not agree with what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ This, then, is the ideal that Ray Bradbury would have us aspire to. But once this lofty ideal is taken out of its theoretical comfort zone, it begins to crumble in the reality of the real world.

There are two striking examples. The first one are the Prophet Muhammad cartoons. At the heart of the issue were twelve cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, on the 30th of September 2006. Besides defying the Islamic ban on depicting the Prophet, some of the cartoons were also considered offensive. For instance, one cartoon portrayed Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, with a lit fuse and the Islamic creed (shahada) written on the bomb.

It sparked an outcry of immense proportions. Repercussions were felt throughout the world. As of 2006, more than a hundred people had lost their lives during riots. Strikes, protests and demonstrations were held in Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, the Gaza Strip, and eleven churches in Nigeria were razed to the ground. Diplomatic relations suffered as various embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Libya were stormed by mobs. Ambassadors were recalled.

In the face of such extreme violence, it then becomes difficult to say that we should not censor. Are the lives and diplomatic ground lost worth allowing some people to be insensitive, to offend and hurt the feelings of another group? In the clash of ideologies between the West and Islam, is freedom of speech worth more than respect for other religions?

These are all difficult questions, with no clear-cut answers. At first glance, censorship seems extremely tempting. If these cartoons had not been published, there would have been no outbreak of violence.

But all that is so much water under the bridge. What is important now is where we go from here on the issue of censorship. And at the end of the day, some have argued that the cartoons controversy has had its value: in exposing Islamophobic prejudices in the Western world, in allowing the Western community itself to speak up against irresponsibility in using that freedom of speech, not to mention exposing the double standards that sometimes exist when it comes to censorship. A prime example was that Jyllands-Posten had earlier rejected caricatures of Jesus on the grounds that it would cause controversy. The editor of Jyllands-Posten has also been quoted as saying that had he known that all this would have resulted, he would not have posted the cartoons, thus showing up his own ignorance and lack of knowledge of the Muslim community.

Some have also argued that all this are merely symptoms of a far larger problem that has been brewing: namely, Samuel Huntingdon’s ‘clash of civilizations’, the clash of contradictory ideologies – the growing tension between the West and extremist brands of Islam. They liken this recent controversy to lancing a boil before it has had a chance to suppurate and fester, and hope that this will spark off a greater effort towards understanding before the problem becomes too big to handle.

The second example is found closer to home.

Recently, an online columnist, mr brown (Lee Kin Mun) wrote an article for his column in a local newspaper Today, titled ‘Singaporeans are fed, up with progress!’ In it, he spoke of the rising costs of living in Singapore and made several cracks at the government, for instance – ‘We are very thankful for the timing of all this good news (rising prices of electricity, taxi fares and so on)</i>, of course. Just after the elections, for instance. By that I mean that getting the important event out of the way means we can now concentrate on trying to pay our bills. It would have been too taxing on the brain if those price increases were announced during the election period, thereby affecting our ability to choose wisely.’

The government naturally retaliated to this veiled accusation of information suppression. The Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts (MICA) responded with a letter that called mr brown’s column a ‘diatribe’ that ‘poured sarcasm’ and lacked ‘constructive criticism and alternatives’. The letter continues:

‘mr brown's views on all these issues distort the truth. They are polemics dressed up as analysis, blaming the Government for all that he is unhappy with. He offers no alternatives or solutions. His piece is calculated to encourage cynicism and despondency, which can only make things worse, not better, for those he professes to sympathise with.’

Shortly after, Today suspended mr brown’s column.

This sparked an outroar in the online communities, considering that the new government under Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has been talking about open discussions and in his recent National Day Rally, ‘move ahead open up’. However, on the issue of mr brown, he also said that ‘this is really not the way to carry on a public debate on national issues and especially not in the mainstream media’.

What then is the right way? Should columnists dress up their criticisms of the government in polite speech and disguise their anger at what they feel are unfair policies (like means-testing, for instance)? Should we water down our ‘polemic’ so as to ensure that we do not step on government toes?

The Singapore government would say yes. Their standard response to any undesirable material in print is to tell the journalist that he is being a ‘partisan player’ in ‘politics’, and should go and join an opposition party. But what happened to civil society? Are civilians not part of the political process? Are they not entitled to express their views, especially on bread-and-butter issues that are closest to them?

Reporters sans Frontieres (based in France) rated Singapore 140th out of 167 countries on press freedom. Singapore’s press freedom is notoriously controlled by the Singaporean government, not only through heavy-handed coercion but through a fine-tuned balance of co-opting journalists into taking the official stance.

Of course, this only works for the mainstream media (which is why mr brown’s article would never have shown up in the Straits Times). When an independent blogger like mr brown decides to state his views (not couched in polite terms), the government cracks down.

The problem with Singapore and censorship is that what exactly is offensive, what exactly is ‘partisan’ involvement in politics, is never clearly defined. In fact, what is allowed and what is not is never clearly defined either. If mr brown had written a column stating that prices were up but the government was doing its best to help Singaporeans cope, would the government have responded nonetheless? Would it have slammed him for being partisan to the government, instead of against it?

Essentially, the problem with censorship is that we can never know what is offensive and what is not. We can never know what should be censored and what should not, what will spark the wrath of another group, and what will not. This is best reflected in another Singaporean example - the Out of Bounds (OB) markers. These markers are issues and topics that are considered taboo for public debate – but there is never any official stand as to what these topics actually are. OB markers shift with the times and the government in power – and to confuse matters further, some topics are allowed, but only if you take the official stance.

What this breeds is then a cautious mindset, where people choose instead to err on the side of caution, where they second-guess the OB markers and self-censor their own statements and opinions, just in case they fall foul of these arbitrary boundaries that are not stated. The sheer ambiguity of the OB markers is a very real dampener on free speech and the expression of opinion, as much so as laws and actual censorship.

It would be clichéd to end this with the usual plea for responsible censorship and responsible use of freedom of speech. If everyone were responsible in exercising his or her rights, censorship would not be an issue. If censorship could be responsible and not arbitrary, there would be no danger.

Instead, there are alternatives to censorship. Regulation, for instance, is capable of achieving a better balance between allowing people to have their right to self-expression and the right of some people not to be offended by these opinions. Similar to the way we regulate films by giving them ratings, regulation entails that we provide warnings as to the content of books or statements. In this way, people can then choose whether they wish to be exposed to the content.

Besides protecting certain groups while allowing some to say what they want, this choice allows those who are undecided to have the option of exposing themselves to different views. Regulation is a step on the way to becoming a more mature society, a sign that society is now more capable of thinking for itself, a society that is willing to acknowledge the existence of differing points of view and consider them all carefully, rather than suppressing information or forcing it underground.

Beatty asserts that books can be ‘traitors’, because ‘others can use them too’, to back up their points of view, and that is why they should be burned. But books contradict each other because they are representatives of different points of view, ranging from the well-thought out to the radical to the misinformed. Let the books go on arguing. They are the living symbols of debate and discourse, through which we will achieve greater understanding.

Offence is a part of understanding and it allows information to be disseminated. Censorship solves no problems by sweeping them under the carpet to simmer and finally explode. If the alternative to offence and public debate is allowing people’s minds to be numbed to the realities of ideological clashes in today’s world, then I say that offence is the lesser of two evils.