'Dangerous Ideas' Review: The Follies of Censorship

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Terms like blasphemy, subversion and hate speech are impossible to define. No wonder attempts at censorship are inconsistent and often absurd.

Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto Jonathan Rose June 7, 2021 6:18 pm ET

'Free Speech Is Killing Us" was the title of a polemical op-ed published in the New York Times in 2019. Surveying various unconnected crimes and political developments, the article's author, New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz, warned that "the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood."

A commitment to open expression has always defined liberalism, which gradually expanded our First Amendment protections. But now we see many liberals abandoning that principle, perhaps because they are no longer liberals in any meaningful sense of the term. How could they be, if they want tech barons to police our online reading? Facebook recently decided to stop blocking posts that suggested a "lab-leak" origin of Covid, but at the same time the company has been boasting of its efforts to downrank or "shadow-ban" accounts that share "misinformation" (in other words, they make it difficult for readers to find those accounts, without telling the account owners).

We sorely need a reminder of the follies and crimes of censorship. In "Dangerous Ideas," Eric Berkowitz, a journalist and lawyer, offers a global history that identifies some recurring patterns in the suppression of free thinking. For starters, crackdowns almost inevitably happen when societies confront overwhelming crises. Philosophy flourished in ancient Athens, where free males (at least) enjoyed intellectual liberty, but after the Athenians suffered military defeat and a devastating pandemic, they canceled Socrates. Then Plato's "Republic," putting words into Socrates' mouth, laid out a program for absolute control of speech and thought, anticipating in detail modern totalitarianism. Reading Plato, Mr. Berkowitz recognizes Mao's Cultural Revolution.

The author also dissects iconoclasm. We may try to purge history by destroying graven images—as the Roman Senate did to Emperor Domitian, for instance, or Reformation converts did to Catholic icons, or French revolutionaries did to aristocratic art (which the Louvre was created to preserve). In normal times public statues are restrooms for pigeons, but in moments of panic they must be toppled.

Often censorship involves a swing of the pendulum, where a burst of untrammeled liberty produces a repressive reaction. The English Puritans demanded freedom of worship, but once Oliver Cromwell was in charge, they shut down pamphleteers and the theater. The French Revolution first liberated journalists, then guillotined them. The ratification of the First Amendment to America's Constitution was followed by the Sedition Act. Mr. Berkowitz notes that Weimar Germany produced "Anders als die Andern," the first sympathetic film treatment of homosexuality. The Nazis destroyed every print they could find, and only fragments survive today. Often, the damage done by censorship is permanent.

What emerges from "Dangerous Ideas" is that ideological terms like blasphemy, subversion and hate speech are impossible to define. Thus there are never clear guidelines for censorship, which is inevitably inconsistent and often absurd. "We really do not know what is demanded of us," protested a czarist censor jailed for making a wrong call. Facebook moderators can only be fired, but face a similar quandary.

Mr. Berkowitz recognizes that "censorship doesn't work. The ideas animating suppressed speech remain in circulation and, in the end, can become more effective for being forbidden." Everyone in prerevolutionary France read Voltaire, who knew that outlawed books sold phenomenally. But censorship can still exact an enormous price. Without a free press, the French people could not know what was going on at Versailles. Rumors and paranoia rushed into that information vacuum and corroded faith in royal institutions until they collapsed.

"Dangerous Ideas" does reproduce some erroneous ideas. In the notorious 2017 memo that got James Damore fired from Google, the software engineer's point was not, as Mr. Berkowitz claims, "that women were inferior to men in jobs such as engineering." He did offer constructive suggestions for making Google a workplace more congenial to women. Here Mr. Berkowitz cites Google chief Sundar Pichai's denunciation of Mr. Damore but not Mr. Damore's actual memo. Censors commonly justify censorship by misrepresenting what they suppress.

Given that censorship is used by the powerful to control the masses, it inevitably enforces class biases. In Victorian Britain, plebeian atheists were prosecuted for blasphemy. Gentlemen agnostics like T.H. Huxley and Leslie Stephen weren't. A similar condescension largely explains current anxieties about social media. A.J. Liebling once regretted that "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Now, thanks to the internet, everyone owns one, and for elites in media, technology and government, that prospect is frighteningly democratic.

Even Mr. Berkowitz's faith in free expression is sorely tried by social media. It galls him that (until January 2021) Donald Trump could tweet that the 2020 election was stolen and the 2016 election wasn't. He is appalled by the online "dismissal of scientific findings—even those with urgent, widespread public health implications." As we have seen repeatedly with research and reporting related to Covid-19, however, we cannot assume that those findings will prove to be conclusive.

Mr. Berkowitz is nostalgic for an era when a few anchormen and editors decided what was real news. But after much agonizing, the author ultimately comes down on the side of freedom. Europeans like to think that they have worked out civilized restrictions on social media, but Mr. Berkowitz recognizes that the European Union's "right to be forgotten" blocks links to true information about corrupt politicians and malpracticing doctors. France has even banned "news that falsely report[s] facts" (how Orwellian, and how French).

No doubt there are oceans of rubbish on the internet, but how reliable is the mainstream media? In her book "Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism," the investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson compiled a list of more than 100 "Major Media Mistakes in the Era of Trump." In cases such as the Russia investigation during the Trump administration, dissenting reporters on the internet and in print can and do provide necessary correctives. The marketplace of ideas might actually work, if we let it.

Mr. Rose teaches history at Drew University. He is the author of "Readers' Liberation," in Oxford's Literary Agenda series.