Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News

by Eric Berkowitz

When a regime’s power rests on force rather than consent, its legitimacy requires constant manhandling of the past—in effect, making history an instrument of ideology and power.

For governing authorities, tolerating speech that challenges the status quo implies approval of that challenge, which in turn subverts the myths on which their power is based. If such speech goes unpunished, others are encouraged to follow, and society’s stability can be put at risk. Even in countries where free expression is cherished, we often forget that forgoing censorship requires the embrace of discord as a fair price for the general good. Tolerance is risky. Suppression, on the other hand, is logical—and, across history, it has been the norm.

protections of speech have almost always represented a gain for the powerless at the expense of the governing classes.

censorship doesn’t work. The ideas animating suppressed speech remain in circulation and, in the end, can become more effective for being forbidden.

The public destruction of offending materials, particularly with fire, asserts a ruler’s sole prerogative to command the public discourse and, more essentially, to erase the ideas the targeted texts express. That the thoughts or opinions remain in people’s minds is beside the point (and copies of such texts usually evade destruction in any case). Their very existence is an affront, and visible corrective action must be taken, even if it is transparently futile. The destruction is, in fact, a confession by the authorities that they cannot coexist with nonconforming ideas. Censorship is always, by varying degrees, a display of weakness.

English censor Roger L’Estrange summed up official attitudes when he wrote that public newspapers must be

suppressed because they “make the multitude too familiar with the actions . . . of their superiors.”

At its core, censorship is rooted in the fear of words and pictures; restrictions on them were imposed to avoid the calamities they might trigger. The ancients believed that some word combinations or images were so venomous that their very existence could contaminate society.

In about 6 CE, a certain teacher of rhetoric, Corvus, made the mistake of discussing with his students the pros and cons of birth control for married women. He was hauled into court for treasonous harm to the state.43 We don’t know the outcome of the trial, but the case nevertheless marks a direct line from Plato’s Republic, in which the state only permits lessons that directly buttress its policies.

All societies recast the past, and as governing authorities change (peacefully or not), some aspects of history are brought to the fore while others are deemphasized. In the ancient world, the past was more than a byproduct of political concerns; it was the means by which cultures defined themselves. The past was present, it was coherent, and it told societies what they were, and why.

When one is told not to mention someone’s name, one must, in the words of the historian Charles W. Hedrick, remember to forget: “If one must constantly remember not to mention a person, then one is surely not forgetting that person. . . . The penalty works only so long as those who are condemned remain in the memory.”

The harsh censorship Constantine used to forge a unified church in service of the Roman state, and the church’s own determined adoption of censorship once it gained power, became the model for speech suppression for centuries to come.

the key takeaway from the Arian and similar controversies is that so long as Christianity was decentralized, many Christianities would result. Now, one church would emerge, and its word on doctrine would (at least in theory) be final. Moreover, it would persecute nonconforming Christian groups with the help of imperial Roman muscle.

As the church and the Roman state fused, the old religions were far from stamped out, and the ongoing suppression of pagan learning became state policy. Urged on by church officials, the state passed laws banning anything that contradicted the biblical view of the universe, including philosophical, scientific, and other texts.

To Bruno, retracting beliefs he had obtained through reasoned inquiry was impossible, particularly when the alternative was plainly absurd dogma.

Luther and the press were made for each other; he used plain, emotional language and turned out pamphlets at a blistering clip.

There would have been no Reformation without Luther, and Luther—the first media star—was nothing without the printing press.

The most important catalog was the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1559), which was intended to “expunge from human memory” the names of heretics, blacklisted printers, purveyors of certain sexual works, and other offending matter such as vernacular Bibles.

Elaborate clandestine networks materialized to satisfy demand for banned books, which tended to become more popular because they were prohibited. When Galileo’s Dialogue on Two World Systems went on the Index in the early seventeenth century, even Catholic monks rushed to get it, helping to push the black-market price to ten times the original.

Tyndale is now remembered as a martyr of the Reformation and, with Shakespeare, one of the architects of the modern English language. (The number of now-common phrases he coined—including “fall flat on his face,” “pour out one’s heart,” “the apple of his eye,” “fleshpots,” and “go the extra mile”—is mind-boggling.)

In 1792, three years after freedom of speech and the press was guaranteed in France, censorship returned with deadly force: books were burned, and writers out of step with the regime were persecuted and killed. In the United States, in 1798—just a few years after the First Amendment was ratified—Congress passed a sedition law criminalizing most political dissent.

There is a wide gulf between arguing for free expression and adopting it as government policy, and those fighting for power often forget that the speech of their adversaries is no less worthy of protection than their own.

The principle that the king and his government were above reproach, and could jail anyone who exposed them to contempt, drove continuous seditious libel prosecutions—often accompanied, for maximum intimidation, by raids, searches, and pretrial imprisonment.

but juries were sometimes too outraged to play along.

The prosecutor argued that the book was seditious not only for its content but because it was addressed to those “whose minds cannot be supposed to be conversant with subjects of this sort” and because it was sold on the cheap. In other words, Rights of Man spoke directly to those whose lot its author intended to improve.

The prosecutors argued that those who seek revisions to the political order, especially when they spoke to the lower classes, deserve the state’s most severe punishment, regardless of whether they had tangible designs on the king’s life. None of the juries bought this brand of metaphysics.

Diderot’s entry in the first volume, “Political Authority,” made clear his lack of regard for the absolute monarchy under which he lived: No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. . . . Power deriving from the consent of the peoples subject to it necessarily presupposes conditions that render the wielding of it legitimate, useful to society . . . and within certain fixed limits.

European censorship measures were consistently geared toward deflecting troublesome ideas away from the poor. A novel or story, for example, might be barred if sold at a low price but approved if priced so that only the well-heeled could afford it. Certain French and German plays could be performed in theatres catering to the upper and middle classes, but were forbidden in venues with poor and working-class audiences.

Nineteenth-century censorship conflicts did not just pit elites against their social inferiors, however. Many in the upper classes feared that descriptions of “sinful” behavior would unravel the moral fabric knitting together their own stratum of society. Whereas men of standing considered themselves immune to bad influences from pornography, they felt very differently about their own women and young.

In 1817, police arrested more than twenty pressmen. So began a decades-long run of hundreds of prosecutions against radicals for blasphemy, which prosecutors viewed as an easier sell to middle-class juries than seditious libel, although such charges were usually included. Yet the first accused blasphemer to be brought to trial, William Hone, was no crucifix-smashing rabble rouser. Rather, he was an obscure bookseller and antiquarian with an irreverent sense of humor whose cheap, politically barbed parodies of religion were deemed too incisive for the lower ranks. The Crown badly miscalculated by targeting him.

The prosecutor emphasized that the Catechism’s cheap price placed it in the hands “of the lower classes” who were “ignorant and uninformed” and “not fit to cope” with such blasphemous messaging.

Elites had good reason to be uneasy: the recent revolution in France, and the alarming uprisings in 1830 (France again), 1848 (multiple countries), 1871 (France once more), and 1905 (Russia) made plain the threat of politicized lower classes. While relaxation of speech restrictions followed each upheaval, they often proved temporary as the disruptive potential of unregulated speech revealed itself. Power, as it was constituted in the nineteenth century, saw the populace as a threat.

Yet power and wealth were still hoarded by the very few, and the poor, who worked and lived like animals, saw more clearly than ever what they were missing. They resented it. “The rightful demands of the laborers increased because the people of the land study more, know more, see more,” testified a Hungarian peasant in 1890.

Just as education was denied to the poor, so too was the right to vote. The British historian Thomas Macaulay maintained that expanded suffrage would lead the populace to “plunder every man . . . who has a good coat on his back and a good roof over his head.”48 The result, declared the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, would be “the superiority of . . . workers over employers.”

he asked the censor what the problem with the play was. “Nothing at all,” the censor replied, “but I thought to myself, ‘One can never tell!’”56

Just as Zola’s literary naturalism became obscene when translated into English, Ellis’s study on homosexuality became illegal when released to the general public. In both cases, it was the readers who had changed, not the works, and “lewdness,” “wickedness,” and “debauchery” were ascribed to the broader public that received them.

To further eviscerate Polish culture, and to prevent the formation of a cadre of resistance leaders, the Polish educated classes were murdered en masse. “In my area,” said one Nazi administrator, “whoever shows signs of intelligence will be shot.”87

The American attitude toward war reportage was summarized by Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations: “I wouldn’t tell the people anything until the war is over, and then I’d tell them who won.”

The first American reporter to reach Nagasaki was George Weller of the Chicago Daily News. His moving September 8 and 9 dispatches on the effects of “Disease X” as a result of the nuclear attack, whereby victims were suffering the same symptoms as those described by Burchett, were buried by American military censors. (Carbon copies of the articles were discovered by Weller’s son in 2003 and were published in Japan two years later.)

But when “speech” becomes the enemy of free expression—when citizen speakers are reduced to online “users” whose scarce attention is manhandled for profit; when tsunamis of online garbage are weaponized to drown out voices and dilute truth (what Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, called “flood[ing] the zone with shit”8); when algorithms decide whose voices are heard or magnified; and when corporations frame their buying of elections and burying of climate change information as free speech—it may be time to rethink some cherished assumptions.

While most of the comments were forgotten, they and some very tangible actions against his perceived media enemies have collectively “dangerously undermined truth” and chilled critical reporting, as a 2020 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists concludes.36 According to a lawsuit filed by PEN America, a nonprofit association of writers and media professionals, about one-third of its members avoided reporting on certain topics out of concern over potential retaliation, and more than half believed criticism of the administration would put them at risk.

In a 2018 report, Killing the Messenger, the International News Safety Institute documented seventy-three journalist killings worldwide that year, just seven of which resulted in legal proceedings.43

perhaps it should be compared to a fixed wrestling match, where volumes of “cheap speech,” as the scholar Tim Wu calls it, are deployed by one side to “attack, harass, and silence” the other.49 The match is rigged because the promoters—Internet companies—favor the loudest, dirtiest fighters. False, hateful, and sensational speech holds users’ attention, which in turn drives ad revenues. Algorithms amplify such messages, not because of their value to truth or public discourse, but because they generate money.

The fact is that people on social media are not modern-day town criers, but mere users, to be baited and manipulated for the enrichment of others. “Clever implementation of persuasive technology created the illusion of user choice,” writes the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Facebook critic Roger McNamee, “making the user complicit in a wide range of activities that exist only for the benefit of the platforms.

Internet platforms have become virtual states unto themselves, but without the duties of states. No one voted for them, nor do we know exactly how they and their algorithms manage our speech.

Once users are engaged, the platforms assemble comprehensive dossiers on their interactions, buying patterns, prejudices and hatreds, even emotional states, which are in turn monetized with the sale of targeted advertisements. Until recently, Facebook allowed advertisers to target ads to the category “Jew haters.” During a 2019 US measles outbreak, Facebook distributed anti-vaccination ads to pregnant women. “Platforms are . . . incentivized to permit and even to encourage the spread of extreme or controversial harmful speech, as it is likely to directly benefit them financially,” write Jeff Gary and Ashkan Soltani.59

“Platforms have little incentive to eliminate filter bubbles,” explains McNamee, “because they improve metrics that matter: time on site, engagement, sharing.”75 That perpetual sense of indignation we feel on social media is exhausting, but it keeps us tethered to our laptops and phones.

For Internet companies, and to the detriment of users in more tolerant jurisdictions, the price of doing business internationally is that censorship decrees in one country could apply elsewhere or worldwide.

By far the worst censor of online speech is China, both in the scale, sophistication, and brutality of its suppression and in its expanding reach around the world.

The Great Firewall restricts the lives and minds of China’s eight hundred million web users in countless ways, governing what they see, say, and learn, judging every one of their keystrokes and clicks, and imposing a range of punishments for violating restrictions.