[WikiEN-l] What's wrong with censorship?

Wed Mar 30 01:51:02 UTC 2005

On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 05:30:08PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> RK emerged from his lonely exile to comment that censorship is
> suppression of IDEAS.
	[snip]
> When a junior high school library decides not to shelve Lady Chatterly's
> Lover (or The Story of O), that is most definitely censorship. Whether
> you think pubescent students should be "shielded" from sexual texts or
> not, the ACT of shielding them has a name, and it's called "censorship".

While I can understand both definitions of the word "censorship", I
think it is far more useful to draw the distinction around the type of
behavior that seeks to suppress ideas or deny points of view a public
hearing, as opposed to that which simply refuses to support particular
points of view.

For instance, it would be absurd (it seems to me) to state that when I
choose to buy novels by Neal Stephenson and not to buy novels by Stephen
King that I am "censoring" King by not supporting his work, granting it
space on my bookshelf, or recommending it to my friends.  To define
"censorship" this broadly makes the term meaningless.

Censorship, it seems to me, needs to be defined in terms of a space of
discourse, and an act of intrusion upon it.  There have to be speakers
who want to speak, listeners who want to listen, and an act which
stifles the speech for the purpose of keeping it from being heard by
those who would choose to hear.

(Government schools are such a bad example, and so frequently cited,
precisely because they come already politicized.  They are supported
with taxpayer funds which people do not have the choice to withhold;
everyone is compelled to underwrite whatever the schools teach.

That is why people get so agitated when government schools teach things
they disapprove of -- not just because *someone* is teaching sex or
religion or whatever, but because it's being done with *our money* and,
in a republic, with the presumption of the "consent of the governed".
When than consent has *not* really been given, people get indignant at
the presumption.

Wikipedia has none of those problems.)

> Complying with local, regional or national laws which forbid certain
> expressions or depictions is also censorship. If we want to send a print
> edition to "strait-laced" countries, such as Communist China (or
> possibly even Uganda), we will have to respect their laws - or try
> smuggling in some CDs instead. I want no part of smuggling (the legal
> liability is too high).

Wikipedia has a structural commitment to the idea that open public
collaboration, with a focus on neutrality, can generate value and can
approximate truth.  Wherever this idea or its practice is forbidden,
Wikipedia is by necessity subversive and illegal.

There's no getting around that.  If there is a regime under which NPOV
is illegal because (let's say) all credit must be given to the Great
Leader, then Wikipedia must either fail to propagate into that regime,
or else defy the laws of that regime.  It cannot propagate into that
regime without either breaking the law or becoming anti-Wikipedia.

Where the law says we must lie, we simply must not go unless we are
willing to break the law.  If we go there and follow the law by lying,
then we have destroyed what we went there to build.

> Masking censorship by calling it "editorial decisions" sounds timid at
> best. Why not call a spade a spade?

What we have -is- a spade.  It makes no sense to call a perfectly
innocent spade by the name of a sword that has brought untold death and
mutilation to the world.

-- 
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>