The Shears of the Censor

The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous on the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? By burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women. . . .by force feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some university lord and used to purchase or preserve his
privileges and hoodwink the world.

Free thinkers throughout history have sought to expose these deceitful practices and to tell the truth about the real enemies of the mind. From Socrates and Cicero through Lucretius to Bruno, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, that task has been bravely undertaken-their honor can be proclaimed and celebrated.

Each culture will produce its own pap.

The chief mode of censorship in a commercial society is, naturally enough, the marketplace. What will the bookstore stock, the library lend, the papers report, the publishers publish?

In short, the question is: Do I own my own beliefs, or do they own me? If they own me, then the institutions that formulate and guard and sanctify these notions own me. I have joined a group. To say, "I am a philatelist and a member of the stamp club," is one thing. To say, "I love to collect stamps, and I attend meetings of the stamp club," is quite another.

Because so many dogmas are obvious fictions, they can be maintained only by means of patient and repeated indoctrinations, through promises of punishment and prompt retaliation for any lapse. One can identify falsehoods by finding the facts that tattle on them, but an equally good signal is the security that surrounds their insecurity: the walls and towers and guns and radio stations, the beating tom-toms, the pulsing pulpits, the political pronouncements, historic myths, martyred heroes, infallibles, and invincibilities upon whose shields the enemy's missiles must harmlessly ring and clatter to a holy ground.

From "Shears of the Censor" by William Gass
Harper's Magazine, April 1997