Posted on 02/19/2009 8:19:02 PM PST by annalex
Our legal thinking is that of property rights trumping any other consideration. The Catholic legal thinking is that error has no rights: that the owner of a harmful book should be treated like the owner of an environmental hazard. He perhaps should be compensated for his monetary loss, but if the book is bad, then the book should ideally be destroyed.
I don’t see how that role of the state, as protector from environmental hazards is contradicted by Mt 22:21. That is why we are to pay taxes: to jail thieves, have stable currency, burn bad books... All that is Caesar’s work.
Which brings us back to the question of why you are posting socialistic opposition to property rights on this site.
Odd; I keep hearing that the current Pope rejected efforts to recruit him to that project in his youth. Or are you now declaring that to be mere "spin", and "no longer operative"?
I am a conservative, and this is a conservative news and opinion site. I in fact have great sympathy to libertarian ideas that revolve so much around property rights, but it is not the sum total of conservatism, nor even the focus of it. I think that preservation of institutions of society,— church, religion and culture chief among them — is more important than maintaining free market, especially in the sphere of ideas where next to nothing of value has emerged in the past half a century, and that is being charitable. You seem to have a childish idea that conservatism is akin to nazism. You need to grow out of it.
I would, again, remind the reader that the encyclical was given in 1832. Since then, much has changed, especially in the mass culture, and consequently the needs of censorship shifted to things like movies, television and the Internet, and away from books. Another change is that the civilized world was govered by “princes” as His Holiness put it — in other words, by hereditary rulers whose power was a form of property right. We are almost universally governed by elected leaders, and our obligations of loyalty changed accordingly. It is hard, for example, to pledge allegiance naturally owed to a prince, to a team of professional politicians propelled into electability by the media elite, who treat the entire domestic product, it seems, as their own wallet. If we indeed had a free market, property rights system worth preserving, I’d be all for it, but I don’t think we do, and what has remained of it will be soon rendered worthless by the scam artists in DC.
Indeed, I think we can be pretty certain that Paul was glad about it (as for Apollos, he was in Corinth). But again, that is not the point. The problem is that Gregory was attempting to use Acts 19 to justify censorship on an Apostolic basis. Here is the relevant portion of the encyclical:
15. Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again?
16. The Church has always taken action to destroy the plague of bad books. This was true even in apostolic times for we read that the apostles themselves burned a large number of books.[23]
The fact is that the burning of scrolls in Acts 19 has nothing to do with the censorship that he advocates.
All these disctinctions of ownership and coercion are simply not addressed by the encyclical.
A major oversight on Gregory's part!
It seems to be written from the assumption that the state is engaged in some form of control over the press; the Church on her part sees it fit to advise the state on how to exercise proper censorship.
No, State control over the press is not a given, because it is the alleged justness of censorship that he is trying to prove. And to bring the Holy Apostles into his argument the way that he did was shameful.
The thrust of the argument is that some books are "bad". They remain bad no matter who owns them. They are to be detroyed as a matter of sanitation.
Ideas can be bad, and books can contain bad ideas, but books are still just ink on paper. And bad ideas can be defeated in argument by good ones. So if the Church's arguments really are superior to all others then why the need for censorship?
On the other hand, the Pope speaks approvingly of legal authority, so from that alone we can presume that pogrom of private property by some vigilante book-burning mob is note what His Holiness was contemplating.
OK.
Let us not forget that the near-absolute freedom of the press, as well as the radical separation of Church and state are very recent and on balance, I think, unsuccessful social experiments. The mass slaughter of the 20c, the corrupt decadence of our time bear out the grim predictions Pope Gregory XVI so presciently made in 1832.
Regarding the mass slaughter of the 20th century, that was done by regimes that made copious and violent use of state censorship to keep people from questioning the myths they were being told in order to cover up the horrible reality.
Do you honestly think that censoring books will make people behave morally? The problem is not freedom of speech, or freedom of the press. The problem is when leftist fools are made tenured professors in taxpayer-funded institutions so that we end up paying them for spouting their bad ideas uncontested to captive audiences. These pinkos certainly have the right to express their so-called "thoughts," but they don't have any "right" to their silliness being subsidized.
The separation of society and state is, ultimately, the difference between a free society and a totalitarian regime. In both philosophical and practical terms, people who turn to the state for cultural support are eqivalent to people who turn to the state for financial support. In both cases, the result is to degrade the petitioner, destroy the petitioner's ability to be self-sufficient, and ultimately to destroy the very thing the petitioner is trying to take without earning.
If we indeed had a free market, property rights system worth preserving, I’d be all for it
I am reminded of the hypocrisy of greenies who assert that nuclear power is not viable because of the high cost of building a new plant, when it is their own obstructionism that contributes heavily to those costs in the first place. To cry crocodile tears over government interference with the free market while demanding such interference in the name of culture is no more persuasive.
Indeed.
Why should God be so jealous of the wooden idols of the heathen? Could he not compete with Baal? Was he envious of the success of the Egyptian magicians? Was it not possible for him to make such a convincing display of his power as to silence forever the voice of unbelief?Frankly, Gregory's rejection of the correct course --opposing ing bad ideas with the Church's (presumably) good ones -- is just plain lazy. Isn't that one of the Seven Deadly Sins?
--Robert Ingersoll
Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again?In fact, every sane man takes precisely that position. For instance, it is only the insane green extremists who insist on prohibiting the use of DDT in place of the rational course of making it available and providing medical care to individuals who overdose on it or prove unusually susceptible.
But it does. It establishes the fact that a "bad book" (leaving aside the important question of who decides whether it is bad) is better off burned, that is, not distributed. This establishes a barrier to distribution of bad books a good. Censorship is a public good, just like purity of drinking water is a public good. You want to concentrate on process, -- how is the distribution of bad books is to be accomplished, and that is an important question, but before we do that, we need to agree that censorship itself is a public good. It is not an oversight to put the horse in front of the carriage and discuss the important things first, even more so when obedience to laws is urged in the same encyclical.
if the Church's arguments really are superior to all others then why the need for censorship?
The pope spoke for his time and I can with greater confidence speak of mine. These are the evils he mentions:
Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute. The holiness of the sacred is despised; the majesty of divine worship is not only disapproved by evil men, but defiled and held up to ridicule. Hence sound doctrine is perverted and errors of all kinds spread boldly. The laws of the sacred, the rights, institutions, and discipline -- none are safe from the audacity of those speaking evil. Our Roman See is harassed violently and the bonds of unity are daily loosened and severed. The divine authority of the Church is opposed and her rights shorn off. She is subjected to human reason and with the greatest injustice exposed to the hatred of the people and reduced to vile servitude. The obedience due bishops is denied and their rights are trampled underfoot. Furthermore, academies and schools resound with new, monstrous opinions, which openly attack the Catholic faith; this horrible and nefarious war is openly and even publicly waged. Thus, by institutions and by the example of teachers, the minds of the youth are corrupted and a tremendous blow is dealt to religion and the perversion of morals is spread. So the restraints of religion are thrown off, by which alone kingdoms stand. We see the destruction of public order, the fall of principalities, and the overturning of all legitimate power approaching. Indeed this great mass of calamities had its inception in the heretical societies and sects in which all that is sacrilegious, infamous, and blasphemous has gathered as bilge water in a ship's hold, a congealed mass of all filth.
Note that he does not just bemoan academic exercises of philosophers and scientists. The evil he is talking about is not something one can debate and score an intellectual victory. The French Revolution, for example, was a massive anti-Catholic pogrom that killed innocent people by the thousand, desecrated holy places, and stole property. How do you debate that? The evils of nazism and Communism were still a century away but the seed of these evils was sown at the French Revolution and the subsequent unrest that ensued after the Napoleonic wars.
The intellectual, purely academic component can indeed be debated. But a secret society, like, for example, the Lodge, cannot be debated -- it is secret for a reason. And how do you debate the today's public school Komissariat or those champions of 1st Amendment freedoms, the pornographers?
the mass slaughter of the 20th century, that was done by regimes that made copious and violent use of state censorship
That is true, but irrelevant. Naturally, an oppressive society will also oppress free thought. It is like saying that because Hitler had a modern army the US should not have one. The US that helped defeat Hitler had a robust system of censorship of its own.
Do you honestly think that censoring books will make people behave morally?
Television and porn today, primarily, although a return of the Index would be good to guide the certain "ardent" Catholics in Madame Pelosi's mold too. Well, no, just like making sure there is no sewerage in the drinking water is not going to make everyone a picture of health overnight. But protecting the filth in the water, -- and that is what the freedom of speech in the US has defacto become is sure to geve nearly everyone dysentery. I agree, of course, that defunding the entrenched left would be also a very good idea.
Well said. I agree: the state is not the society; it is a tool that the society whould use. That includes the Church (a free institution in the society) using the state as it works for the public good. Of course, the state cannot run the Church after the manner of the Anglicans of Calvin's Geneva, anymore than the state can write the Gospels. But the Church can very easily inform the state and in fact has an obligation to do so.
It is God's evident pleasure to have men think for themselves, or else He would not give us free will. With that free will comes the responsibility to please God in turn. It is not the matter of "Is God strong enough to destroy Satan?" -- of course He is. It is however, the matter of men freely rejecting the deceptions of Satan. A free society will not remain free for very long unless it builds an infrastructure where holiness can survive. We have a society where holiness is rare, especially in the institutions of learning. Hence the need for censorship.
You cannot simultaneously assert an answer to a question and claim to be "leaving aside" the same question. Done deliberately, this is a knavish attempt to evade scrutiny; done accidentally, this is a form of intellectual ineptitude.
we need to agree that censorship itself is a public good
Really, now; how many times are you going to attempt to stipulate what you are required to demonstrate? Are you hoping that your circular arguments will cause your opponents to become too dizzy to respond?
The pope spoke for his time and I can with greater confidence speak of mine. These are the evils he mentions:
A few highlights of the more glaring problems:
The laws of the sacred, the rights, institutions, and discipline -- none are safe from the audacity of those speaking evil.The French Revolution, for example, was a massive anti-Catholic pogrom that killed innocent people by the thousand, desecrated holy places, and stole property."Safe"? These institutions are so fragile that they can be brought down by mere verbal opposition?
Our Roman See is harassed violently
Lacking specific examples of this "violence", one cannot evaluate this claim, either for historical accuracy or for moral integrity. (By "moral integrity" I mean the question of whether the Chruch has a legitimate complaint, in that it was the victim of measures that the Church would under no circumstances visit upon "heretical societies" if given the power to do so.)
The divine authority of the Church is opposed and her rights shorn off.
Again, the "rights" at issue need to be clarified. However, it seems that we need not wait long:
The obedience due bishops is denied and their rights are trampled underfoot. Furthermore, academies and schools resound with new, monstrous opinions....
The assertion of a "right" to obedience and to the absence of contrary views is an example of the modern conflation of "rights" with "whims". I find the complaint unimpressive, for reasons most easily illustrated by the following quote:
"You don't like the Goths?"
"No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!"
"Persecution?" Padway raised his eyebrows.
"Religious persecution. We won't stand for it forever."
"I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased."
"That's just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn't persecution, I'd like to know what is!"
--L. Sprage deCamp (Lest Darkness Fall)
That is an example of the evils to be expected when the state arrogates to itself the right to "burn bad books" and enforce intellectual conformity.
a secret society, like, for example, the Lodge, cannot be debated
The secrecy of groups from the Scientologists to the Ku Klux Klan has somehow failed to prevent the public dissection and rebuttal of their viewpoints.
Here, you refute your own argument. Obviously, one who is forcibly prevented from hearing the deceptions of Satan cannot freely reject them.
Regarding censorship being a public good indeed that is the topic of the Encyclical, but somehow I don't see that central point being rebutted. I see dark references to the nazis and some analysis of what happened in Acts 19, but not much argument on that central point (except that Baal/Satan one, to which I'll get in a moment).
can be brought down by mere verbal opposition?
Verbal opposition would have been fine, it has been there as long as the Church herself. The violations of the Church rights, imprisonment of the Pope, killing of priests, monks and nuns, looting church property were not exactly verbal opposition.
Obedience due bishops is a legal reality. One can, of course, leave the Catholic church, but a Catholic indeed owes obedience to bishops.
the evils to be expected when the state arrogates to itself the right to "burn bad books" and enforce intellectual conformity
Without defending the imbecility of the royal houses of the time, do you really think that mass murder and looting of the French clergy in the Robespierre's terror was something the clergy deserved?
Censorship is all a matter of proper place and manner. The Church never shunned an intellectual debate. The issue is agitation of the masses, miseducation and outright seduction. Pornography, for example, is not something that needs to be "debated"; it simply should be if nto completely banned, then restricted to some red light districts where children do not roam. Likewise the mockery of the Christian practices (see, for example, Jack Chick pamphlets, banned on this forum) is not an intellectual debate and it is not something that one needs to be informed about as if it is a scientific theory.
Now, why didn't President Obama think of that? If he had simply decided to "not address" the issue of where the government gets the money he proposes to spend, he could have put the whole question of soak-the-rich taxation out of bounds....
Hollywood, for example, had its own censorship outfit, had it not?
Private actors cannot "censor"; they can merely grant or withhold patronage. Really, it's past time to declare English a dead language and invent a new name for whatever it is people speak and write these days.
I don't see that central point being rebutted.
Your visual deficiencies are a matter for you and your optometrist.
The violations of the Church rights, imprisonment of the Pope, killing of priests, monks and nuns, looting church property were not exactly verbal opposition.
The point was in response to a denunciation of "the audacity of those speaking evil", which is clearly a complaint about verbal opposition, not a protest against actual abuse.
Without defending the imbecility of the royal houses of the time, do you really think that mass murder and looting of the French clergy in the Robespierre's terror was something the clergy deserved?
The natural results of a worldview may indeed be much harsher than is "deserved" by any reasonable standard. For instance, being overly trusting of strangers can have all sorts of dire consequences, surely not "deserved" as a result of a basically good impulse, but that's life.
In this case, one can only say that the Church was warned about the danger of placing the power to suppress dissent into the hands of the state ("he who lives by the sword...").
I agree that private suppression of evil speech is not technically censorship, but then the encyclical is not necessarily discussing state censorship only either. It gave an example of the Apostle Paul causing the burning of books, which was clearly a private decision.
Speech is evil if ot leads to acts that are evil. Ideas have consequences.
But it does. It establishes the fact that a "bad book" (leaving aside the important question of who decides whether it is bad) is better off burned, that is, not distributed. This establishes a barrier to distribution of bad books a good.
No, again. Pope Gregory said that "we read that the apostles themselves burned a large number of books" which is, again, not true because Acts does not say anything about the Apostles burning any books. But even when we consider that Paul likely approved the burning (or even if we assume that Paul really did participate in the burning, even though Acts doesn't say this) it is an illogical leap to derive from this a general principle about destorying "bad books," especially when you consider that there was no coercion involved in the burning in Acts 19 and your general principle about censorship must involve coercion (otherwise it isn't censorship). Also, given that it was their own scrolls that the converts were burning, this was no question of "distribution" involved. I don't see why this is so hard to understand.
Censorship is a public good, just like purity of drinking water is a public good.
This is a bad analogy. As you claim later in your post, "Well, no, just like making sure there is no sewerage in the drinking water is not going to make everyone a picture of health overnight. But protecting the filth in the water, -- and that is what the freedom of speech in the US has defacto become is sure to geve nearly everyone dysentery." This is a bad analogy because if the water is filthy, then no one has clean drinking water. However, if "bad books" are available (the analogue to your sewerage) then it is still possible to print good ones. Your analogy actually works better as an argument against censorship, because if good books are forbidden then there is nothing but "filthy water."
You want to concentrate on process, -- how is the distribution of bad books is to be accomplished...
Huh?
...and that is an important question, but before we do that, we need to agree that censorship itself is a public good. It is not an oversight to put the horse in front of the carriage and discuss the important things first, even more so when obedience to laws is urged in the same encyclical.
If you want me to agree with you that censorship is a public good, then you'll have to make the case for it. Oddly enough, the arguments that you've been putting forward tend to work the other way.
And once again, the existence of censorship laws cannot be taken as a given, since the necessity of these as a social good is what you're trying prove.
Note that he does not just bemoan academic exercises of philosophers and scientists. The evil he is talking about is not something one can debate and score an intellectual victory. The French Revolution, for example, was a massive anti-Catholic pogrom that killed innocent people by the thousand, desecrated holy places, and stole property. How do you debate that? The evils of nazism and Communism were still a century away but the seed of these evils was sown at the French Revolution and the subsequent unrest that ensued after the Napoleonic wars.
Wait... why did the populist bloodbath called the French Revolution occur in the first place? Was it because Catholic France didn't have enough censorship laws? Or possibly there was too radical a separation of Church and State? LOL!
Gee, you don't think it had more to do with the decadence of the nobility and the clergy (whose roles often overlapped, BTW) at the expense of people who were in many cases starving to death? The same kind of decadence which is being promoted today by our entrenched leftist elites and which you claim that censorship is necessary to counter? Gosh, it worked so well in the past!
The intellectual, purely academic component can indeed be debated. But a secret society, like, for example, the Lodge, cannot be debated -- it is secret for a reason.
Of course it can be debated. We can ask them why, in a country where we have freedom of association, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press; where there is no fear of being persecuted; why do they feel the need to keep everything so secretive? Truth does not fear the light. Censorship laws only tend to give secret societies an air of plausibility that they would otherwise lack, because then they can claim that they only meet in secret and keep their books and teachings secret because of the threat of persecution (remember that in the early days of the Church Christians often met in secret because of the persecutions).
And how do you debate the today's public school Komissariat or those champions of 1st Amendment freedoms, the pornographers?
We're discussing censorship of ideas, not pornography, so let's try to stay on topic. I'm glad you brought up the public schools, though. That's an even bigger problem than the universities, because in public schools it is children who are the captive audience. Again, the problem is not free speech, but that children are being indoctrinated with socialism and the taxpayers are paying for it.
Conservatives often confidently claim that liberalism will simply die out since liberals don't have as many children. But as Dinesh D'Souza pointed out, that won't matter as long as we're all paying for our children to be indoctrinated by socialists.
[the mass slaughter of the 20th century, that was done by regimes that made copious and violent use of state censorship]
That is true, but irrelevant. Naturally, an oppressive society will also oppress free thought. It is like saying that because Hitler had a modern army the US should not have one.
I was mostly just making an observation, but thank you for clarifying my point. A society that oppresses free thought is by definition an oppressive society. A society that keeps a modern army is not.
The US that helped defeat Hitler had a robust system of censorship of its own.
Loose lips sink ships. Do you really think you can make a comparison between wartime censorship and the type of censorship for which Pope Gregory was arguing?
Television and porn today, primarily, although a return of the Index would be good to guide the certain "ardent" Catholics in Madame Pelosi's mold too. Well, no, just like making sure there is no sewerage in the drinking water is not going to make everyone a picture of health overnight. But protecting the filth in the water, -- and that is what the freedom of speech in the US has defacto become is sure to geve nearly everyone dysentery. I agree, of course, that defunding the entrenched left would be also a very good idea.
If I may opine, I think the fact that Madame Speaker was allowed to claim for so long, without discipline from the Church, to be a "good Catholic" in spite of her support for murdering unborn children, was a bigger scandal than what books she might have been reading. That being said, I'm very glad that the Church is beginning to address this.
In order to begin to understand the the rich depth of the Old Testament, Mr. Ingersoll would have to read it through the lens of the New. As St. Augustine tells us:
In the entire number of those divine records which are contained in the sacred writings, the gospel deservedly stands pre-eminent. For what the law and the prophets aforetime announced as destined to come to pass, is exhibited in the gospel in its realization and fulfilment.
Frankly, Gregory's rejection of the correct course --opposing ing bad ideas with the Church's (presumably) good ones -- is just plain lazy.
Not really. After all, he did make an attempt with this encyclical. Unfortunately, he makes it clear in this same encyclical that he would prefer a two-pronged attack with swords to supplement his pen.
The only reason I bothered to reply to this thread in the first place was to respond to Pope Gregory's abuse of that wonderful conversion story that St. Luke tells us about in Acts 19, so that no one else might ascribe to the Holy Apostles the behavior that Gregory was trying to justify. Since I've done that, and since so far all the arguments I've been given in favor of censorship have done nothing but work against it, I think I'll bow out of this thread now. Thank you for the discussion.
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