What Makes Censors Tick?
LA Review of Books | Stephen Rohde
In this long-form piece, Stephen Rohde reviews The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder: The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma by Robert Corn-Revere, a work that covers the lives and work of American advocates of censorship from Anthony Comstock and Dr. Fredric Wertham to Newton Minow, Tipper Gore and Brent Bozell. “Corn-Revere ends…[by] expressing genuine concern that today one of the most serious threats of censorship is not coming from conservative bluenoses but from progressive academics, whom he sees as part of a new anti-free-speech movement.”
Rohde provides an in-depth review of the book, including what Corn-Revere introduces as the “censor’s dilemma,” or why censors are doomed to failure. A “fundamental reason for the censor’s harsh fate is that his [or her] very existence contradicts the arc of history among societies that value freedom.”
Rohde explains how Corn-Revere defines censorship, including what censors have in common— “their unshakable conviction that they ‘know the truth, and must control the ideas or influences to which you may become exposed to protect you from falling into error (or sin)’; and the ‘truth’ may be revealed to the censor ‘by whispers from god, by political theory, by popular vote, or by social science, but once it has been determined, the time for debate is over.’”
Going through the nearly two centuries of censorship leaders explored by Corn-Revere, Rohde’s review (and Corn-Revere’s book) concludes with the author’s warning that today’s “most serious threats of censorship” is coming from “progressive academics, whom he sees as part of a new anti-free-speech movement.”
As Rohde documents, Corn-Revere traces the anti-free speech movement “back to Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist philosopher of the mid-20th century” who “argued that establishing true democracy ‘may require apparently undemocratic means,’ in which ‘certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behaviors cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.’”
“Ideas that have long been discredited by the rest of us need to be discredited anew in every generation,” explains Rohde. “Eternal exposure is the price of enlightenment. Banning, canceling, and censoring are lazy ways to deal with pernicious ideas… Odious ideas need to be repeatedly brought out into the open, subjected to the bright disinfectant of light, and systematically contradicted by critical thinking and empirical evidence.”
Corn-Revere remains optimistic, says Rohdes, but leaves us with a warning: “He [Corn-Revere] ends with the words of…Floyd Abrams, who decades ago warned: ‘The problem with censorship is that it leads to more censorship. It leads to a censorial mentality, to a state of affairs which is, in the most real sense, un-American.’”
