This post started out as a comment responding to Fenzel’s response to my last post – or rather, to some of the conversations surrounding that conversation. Once it hit the 1,000 word mark and acquired a table, I realized that a comment thread was the wrong place for it (if only because I’d already used up all the time that I’d budgeted for Overthinking this week, and it’s my turn to post about something). Specifically, I’m responding to this:
“…expunging all objectionable images through social condemnation and censorship until an idea we don’t like simply doesn’t exist anymore sounds like a great idea when it’s your idea, but there are some pretty huge, massive, ginormous moral problems with anybody systematically doing this.”
The specific words again are Fenzel’s, from the comment thread, but they’re really just a convenient expression of an idea that’s pretty widespread. Censorship is bad, yeah? And stamping out ideas is probably even worse. People who try to control what you think are not mere censors, who after all only care what you say. The term that’s sometimes used is “thought police” — although none of our writers or commenters went there, which is just as well, because it’s such a loaded term that it’s almost a mini-Godwin event, signaling that rational debate is over and a shouting match can begin. Terminology aside, though, controlling what people say and think is not moral. This is just common sense.
And yet like all common sense, there’s more going on here than meets the eye.
Actions speak louder than words. And words speak louder than opinions in absence of words. So with any kind of ideological dispute between an individual and a larger group, we might want to consider whether either party is acting, speaking, or simply thinking. We can even make a table, like so.
For our purposes, it's convenient to imagine that the person goes first, and then society chooses a response. Obviously in real life it's a bit messier.
To give a suitably neutral example, let’s say that the individual is committed to the idea that chocolate chip cookies are delicious. The individual may simply leave their belief as a belief, falling into category A. Alternately, they may tell all their friends that chocolate chip cookies are delicious, write editorials extolling the deliciousness of chocolate chip cookies, or make food-porny paintings of really, really tasty-looking chocolate chip cookies, falling into category B. Most radically, they could do stuff like actually baking and eating chocolate chip cookies, or selling cookie-making paraphernalia, or handing cookies out on the street, or providing material assistance to the Keebler Eleves. A small but predictable number of bad apples will end up trying to burn down a pudding factory.
In other news, this image totally exists.
Society – which, for our purposes here, is chocolate-chip-cookie-averse – also has options. Since we don’t typically think of society as having “thoughts” as such, category 1 just describes a situation where liking chocolate chip cookies is rare enough that openly admitting a fondness for them marks you as kind of a weird dude, with all the subtle attendant consequences. If the Secretary of Cookies issues a press release stating that “Our nation is founded on certain core values, including the principal that a cookie is divinely ordained as a union between rolled oats, raisins, eggs, brown sugar, and cinammon,” it’s category 2. And if the possession of Tollhouse morsels is a class A felony carrying a minimum sentence of no fewer than five years, it’s category three.
According to our current understanding of how government should work, we tend to think that A should be met with 1, B with 2, and C with 3. Let’s pretend that instead of talking about cookies, we’ve been talking about marijuana. Distributing and selling it can get you imprisoned. Speaking in favor of marijuana can not, but will be met with ripostes from the Department of Health. What you believe about marijuana is no one’s business but your own… but if you believe that it’s the bees knees, you also believe that most people (or maybe just “most people”) would disapprove of your opinion. There are a few tricky areas where particularly extreme forms of speech can be met with actual punishment — incitement to violence, for instance, or child pornography, or false police reports. And societal groups of various kinds will pretty regularly respond to A with 2, telling people that it’s un-American not to support the troops, or that turning a blind eye to torture is itself morally equivalent to torture, or whatever. But it should be noted that, although it does happen pretty regularly, A2 is usually seen as a dick move, and often will be met with disapproval both from across the aisle and from the moderate wing of one’s own faction.
Far more troubling, however, is A3, where individuals can wind up in jail or in front of a firing squad just because of their beliefs. In a situation like this, merely thinking something has become a criminal act. And this is where the Orwellian term “thoughtcrime” comes in. If we felt it necessary, we could supplement that term with “speechcrime” and “actcrime,” although these are typically covered by the unmarked term “crime.” (Incidentally, the few kinds of speech that are straight-up illegal in modern American society tend to be parsed as a kind of act for legal purposes. Copyright infringement, for instance, is not a special kind of speech: it is a special kind of thievery. Shouting fire in a crowded theater is prohibited specifically because it will cause actions that the government has a right to prevent, such as the trampling of people to death. Slander and libel need to have demonstrably caused harm, which means that they are not, per the landmark decision in Sticks v. Stones, merely words.)
If we think of there being three different kinds of crime, then there would also be three different kinds of law enforcement. The regular police (who just about everyone approves of save for anarchists and N.W.A.), spend most of their time dealing with illegal acts. Censors, seen as a necessary evil at best, prevent and punish illegal speech. And the term “thought police” applies to people who spend their time preventing and punishing illegal thoughts. Well… kinda sorta. But it doesn’t actually work that way.
Speaking for myself, at least, I’d like to make a firm distinction between the government’s ability to fine, jail, and kill people, and all other forms of coercion. This would mean that “censor” would only apply to a government official whose job is censoring stuff, and “thought police” would be limited to the people that fight “thoughtcrime” in the narrow sense of “thoughtcrime” described above. Are you a law enforcement official who spends his/her time tracking down and arresting people for their private opinions? No? Good! You aren’t the thought police. But I’m happy to acknowledge that, from a descriptive linguistics point of view, this little enough to do with the way that the terms are actually used. In fact, the words “thought police” in particular have taken on a funny little life of their own. The “police” in “thought police” is usually treated less like a noun that has to do with means (i.e. the police: those who enforce the laws with jails, handcuffs, and telescoping batons) and more like a verb that has to do with ends (i.e. to police: to surveil and control behavior in an attempt to prevent certain categories of action). According to this line of reasoning, any and all attempts made by society to discourage any point of view at all can – indeed, must – be seen as a kind of policing of thoughts. By the same token, any attempt to prevent people from expressing a certain opinion — say, by not providing them with a soapbox (and a salary) for their viewpoint — is routinely denounced as censorship.
In one form or another, this is the complaint that is typically leveled at examples of A2 on the chart, one man’s public service announcement being another’s propaganda. Taken to its (il)logical conclusion, this kind of thing can lead to the cockamamie suggestion that A1 is thought policing too — that simply by disagreeing with me, society at large is brainwashing me; that there is no appreciable difference between tacit disapproval and training rats to eat my face. Now, this isn’t to say that widely held “common sense” ideas aren’t like brainwashing in a way, for which see, like, every critical theorist ever (and maybe especially Althusser, who I’ll admit I haven’t read). But as Fenzel likes to quip “in a way” usually means “what I just said is false.” Or as I like to put it, “in one way yes, but let’s please not forget that in all the other ways, no!” Anyway, this broader concept of thought policing is usually prior to the idea of what constitutes a thoughtcrime, and is read back into it after the fact. Do I have an opinion that [Group X] is trying to discourage? Well that makes [Group X] the thought police, which means that they see my idea as thoughtcrime. And the same thing, more or less, goes for censorship and illegal speech. Is [Group X] making it more difficult for me to speak? Well in that case, they are censors. (Never mind that they do not have the classical, governmental censor’s recourse of turning me over to the regular police, they’re trying to stop me from speaking, which is Wrong!) And therefore my speech… well. This is one of the interesting bits.
Thought criminal. Among other things.
If the meaning of the word “thoughtcrime” is going to change to “some unpopular opinion,” and “thought police” to “a group which is trying to eradicate an unpopular opinion,” we would need to let go of the moral dimension of the term. Unpopular doesn’t necessarily mean good. Some people, like Galactus, think that devouring the earth is a good idea. This is not a popular opinion. Now with Galactus, there’s a chance that he’ll make good on that threat, so the stakes are a little higher… like shouting fire in a crowded theater, this might have real-world consequences, so maybe his idea isn’t just an idea. But what about people who can’t make good on the threat? Like, say we’re just dealing with Galactus’ biggest fan – not in-universe, but in our universe. This fan thinks that the eating of planets is just aces. She wouldn’t destroy the world in any other way – that would interfere with eating it, after all – but given a place to stand, and a big enough fork, she’d devour us all without blinking an eye. Is it all right to try to change her opinion?
It depends. It really does. Even with something as cartoonish as wanting to wipe out all life, there are means which we can not morally take. I mean, we could lobotomize her if we wanted to, right? Bam! Problem solved — no more desire to eat the world. But that’s obviously reprehensible. Even if she did pose a threat, we’d probably look for a better way. For instance, we might just point out to her that if she devours the world, it’ll mean no more Marvel comics. And that would be, on the whole, just fine. But it would still be an attempt to police (i.e. control) her thoughts. And if we prevented her from expressing that opinion (say, by laughing her off the soapbox every time she got up to advocate world-eating), that would be an attempt to control (i.e. censor) her speech.
I recognize that I have set up a straw man. Yes, no one would actually call this harmless (if kinda creepy), fan a thought criminal, and no one would call her interlocutor the thought police. I am pretty committed to the idea that words mean what people use them to mean. Efforts to stabilize and control language are necessary and laudable to an extent, but they are always doomed to failure over the long term, and tend to stifle discourse over the short. So when it comes to the phrases “thought police” and “censorship,” I’m going to stick to my descriptivist guns. I may not like the way they’re usually used, I may choose to point out the logical flaws in using them that way… but the fact that the way they’re being used should logically lead to them also being used in the absurd situation I just described doesn’t mean that they actually would be used that way. In its current use, “thought police” is still closely enough associated with the allegorical police state of George Orwell’s 1984 that an aura of shame attaches to the label, and a corresponding aura of righteousness to the label “thought criminal.” Similarly, “censorship” calls up images of book-burning and imprisoned dissidents. Why is that? Well, there are three things about Orwell’s thought police: what they do, how they do it, and why. The first is “change people’s minds.” The second is “through torture and the threat of torture.” The third is “to inspire slavish devotion to a totalitarian dictatorship.” Only two of these facets are evil. And based on my gut understanding of the way the phrase is used these days, only the second is really strongly implied — this is what separates thought policing from mere propaganda. Now, since the term is really only ever used as a hyperbole, we can’t insist that people be referring to torture specifically… so maybe our working, pragmatic definition of “thought police” should be something like “some group that attempts to discourage a certain opinion… through means that the speaker finds repugnant.” And censorship again means “to prevent someone from expressing a certain opinion… through means that the speaker finds repugnant.” They’re both loaded terms, and would not be used if the speaker didn’t want the rhetorical force that comes along with them.
If we plan to use any of these terms ourselves (in their everyday sense), we need to demonstrate that there’s something wrong with our target’s means, not their ends. This still isn’t likely to convince anyone — these are not terms that get tossed around a lot in discussions where one of the parties hasn’t made up their mind already — but it can save us all from a lot of chasing our tails.
Returning to the question that prompted this post: is it ever a good idea to stamp out an idea, root and branch? Again, it depends on the means. It also depends on who’s doing the stamping. It’s not a good idea to do it by burning books. It’s not a good idea to do it by waterboarding. And it’s probably not a good idea for the government to do it in any case, because with governments the potential for book burnings and waterboardings are always sort of there in the abstract, even if the government in question (like ours) has tied that arm behind its back. If the idea can be eradicated by simple persuasion, though, and by a group that doesn’t have the government’s monopoly on violence? That’s a different story. Okay, there might still be something to be said about preserving any idea that’s ever been had in an attempt to, like, increase the biodiversity of the human memepool. Kind of. But even asking this question – as a way of getting at whether ideologically motivated lit-crit is a worthwhile enterprise – assumes a couple of pseudo-Kantian arguments that are, I think, demonstrably untrue. It assumes for one thing that stamping out one instance of an idea is morally equivalent to expunging an idea from society at large… but in fact most ideologically oriented criticism is aimed at ideas that are astonishingly prevalent in society at large, and in no danger of being exterminated. It also assumes that all ideas make a net contribution to the diversity of the universe of ideas… but this is definitely not true, since the idea “ideas should be stamped out” is, itself, an idea. Going back to the metaphorical well, one of the best things that people could currently do to encourage biodiversity is figure out a way to exterminate the Geomyces Destructans fungus. Maybe some ideas are like that.
And even if we accept these universalizing arguments, the situation would not have – or deserve – the moral urgency that attaches to words like “censorship.” (Let alone “thought police.” But again, nobody involved in the original conversation ever did say “thought police.” My mind went there on its own.)