Let Truth and Falsehood Grapple

A.D. IRVINE Let Truth and Falsehood Grapple ... though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truthbe in the field, we do injuriouslyby licensingand prohibiting, to rrUsdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter. John Milton, Areopagitica I ARGUMENTS AGAINST CENSORSHIP Arguments in favour of, and against, censorship have been plentiful since at least the days of the ancient Greeks. Soon after Pericles delivered his famous Funeral Oration championing the open society/ Plato began defending a quite different vision of the ideal republic, one in which censors played a prominent and important role, and where rulers often had amoral obligation to promote false belief.z Since Plato's day, the issue of censorship has been revisited many times. Over the centuries it has been as prominent as the names of those thinkers whose works have been banned, burned, or in some other way prohibited. Inphilosophythese nameshave included Bruno,Gassendi, Hobbes, Hwne, Kant, Mill Russell, and Sartre; in politics, Franklin, Lenin, Locke, Machiavelli , Marx, Paine, Rousseau, and Solzhenitsyn; in the sciences, Bacon, Darwin, Einstein, Gallieo, and Newton; and in literature, Dante, Dickens, Gibbon, Hemingway, Homer, Huxley, Lawrence, Mailer, Murdoch, Orwell, Shakespeare and Shaw, to list only a few of the most famous.3 Today the debate between the advocate and the opponent of censorship remains alive partly as a result of several recent high-profile events. These 1 Thucydides, book II, pp 34-46. The tenn itself was popularized this century by Popper. 2 For example, in The Republic, book II, 377c, Plato makes the following recommendation: 'the first thing willbe to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell theirchildrenthe authorized ones only.' Later, in bookm, 389c- he comments: 'The rulers of the state are the only ones who would have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.' Also compare book Ill, 412a-421C (on the role of the guardians); book v, 457c-{66d (on the abolition of the . family); and book VIII, 555b-S62a (on democracy). 3 For details, see Geller, Green, and Haight and Grannis. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1998 550 A.D. IRVINE have included the 1989 fatwa issued against Salm.an Rushdie,4 Mr Justice Francis Kovacs's 1993 publication ban regarding the trials of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo,s the ongoing obscenity charges laid against many gay and lesbianbookstores} recent controversial attempts within the - university community to regulate offensive language and behaviour," recent federal and provincial legislation limiting third-party election advertising,8 additionallegislation atboth levelsofgovernmentprohibiting the publication of hate literature,9 and portions of the 1996 United States Telecommunications Act designed to impose local community standards upon a world-wide Internet community.10 Allhave served to keep the issue of censorship in the public eye. Just as importantly, several unresolved theoretical issues have also been a factor in keeping the current debate alive. Itis onesuch issue, focusing as it does on the importance oftolerating false belief, which I wish to address here.n 4 See, for example, MacDonogh. Even though the ban by Canada Customswas only in effect for forty-eight hours, Canada was the only Western democracy to see fit to seize copies of The Satanic Verses. 5 See, for example, the April 1994 issue of Wired magazine, which was banned in parts of Canada.The magazine did not itselfcontain information about the Homolka and Bernardo trials, but only about how readers might obtain such informatian over the Internet. 6 In February 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada's landmark Butler decision defined obscenity in such a way as to include both sex with violence and exploitive sex that degrades or dehumanizes. This decision, together with Parliament's June 1993 passing of Bill c-128, opened the door to a wide variety of detentions and seizures. 7 See, for example, Fekete, ch 8. 8 See, for example...