What do many of today's Hollywood movies and the gut wrenching video of George Floyd's death have in common?
They are OBSCENE, Harry Clor would say.
Carl reminded me in a comment on my last post that we as Conservatives should not try to deal with leftist CANCEL CULTURE by becoming free speech absolutists/libertarians ourselves. We should simply align with civil libertarians when it comes to the right to put forward different political opinions. And Carl is right about that.
The airtight logic of Harry Clor’s 1969 book shows that Conservatives can and should try to ban certain forms of expression in order to maintain public morality. By making careful distinctions, Clor once and for all answered the objection raised by the legal community that it is too difficult to distinguish obscenity from other forms of artistic expression that we would wish to be allowed. “You know it when you see it” simply was not a good enough definition of pornography to work in a court of law, as Clor knew- and so he offered this definition:
1) obscenity consists in making public that which is private; it consists in an intrusion upon intimate physical processes and acts or physical-emotional states; and 2) it consists in a degradation of the human dimensions of life to a sub-human or merely physical level. According to these definitions, obscenity is a certain way of treating or viewing the physical aspects of human existence and their relation to the rest of human existence. Thus, there can be an obscene view of sex; there can also be obscene views of birth, of illness, and of acts such as eating or defecating. (p225)
This is a far broader definition of “obscenity” than just what the term “pornography” covers; violence can be obscene too. The brutal suffocation and last 9 minutes of George Floyd’s life were captured on video, but I refused to watch more than a few moments because I considered it to be obscenity. Others said during that summer of 2020 that it was good that millions of Americans watched the video to raise awareness about civil rights. That is a significant objection, but on balance I disagree.
Was Clor’s definition too broad? I think it actually captures the essence of what obscenity is, and why it scars and brutalizes those who watch it. Take the scene from the Two Towers Lord of the Rings movie where a violent defeat in battle is contrasted with Lord Denethor pigging out on lunch. Audiences get grossed out not by the death of soldiers on the battlefield, but by the close-up shot of Denethor eating a tomato; demonstrating Clor’s point that even acts of eating can making for obscenity.
A recent article titled “Lessons from Catholic censorship during Hollywood’s Golden Age” argues that the Legion of Decency was ultimately too puritanical in its attempts to ban obscenity during the 1930s-1950s. The Catholics in charge of the censorship such as Joseph Breen did not do a perfect job in trying to keep Hollywood movies family friendly. After all, it takes a special person to serve in the office of Censor; men like old Cato (who was respected enough to avoid resentment at the same time he chastised) are bound to be rare. But as we look back at those old movies and the old morality of the Greatest Generation, we should not forget that the banning of obscenity in their art was a part of their education toward virtue.
One more reason to not be a libertarian.
CJ, how does Clor think about vulgar speech--it seems to me, it too would fall under obscenity. So much of social media would disappear; not that it wouldn't be an improvement, were people to restrain in themselves the impulse to curse...