An Orwellian Polemic on the Censorship of Words
It is the habit of modern institutions to protect us from words in the same way a nanny protects a child from the rain: with umbrellas, hoods, and blankets, until the child grows up and cannot bear a drop of weather on his own skin.
YouTube now censors certain words altogether, regardless of the circumstances in which they are used. The argument is that these words are indecent or dangerous. Yet a word stripped from a page does not vanish from the language. It continues to exist in the mind, in the street, in the schoolyard. It is only the honest record that is obliterated.
When I hear that a word like cunt is erased from the record, I do not suppose that anyone will be spared a cruel thought. The cruelty is already in the mind, and where the mind leads, the tongue will follow. To forbid the word is only to make discussion dishonest. Similarly, fag is a slur — and a vile one — but if one cannot quote it in order to analyse its vileness, the historian and the teacher alike are struck dumb.
This is the danger: the context is destroyed. A novel, a report, an inquiry into prejudice, all are flattened into the same category as abuse shouted in an alley. It is the logic of a machine, not of a human being. A machine cannot tell the difference between quotation and insult.
It would be foolish to suppose that banning words will eliminate hatred. Hatred is more inventive than that. It changes its mask as quickly as it is stripped away. Today’s proscribed word becomes tomorrow’s euphemism, and the prejudice goes marching on.
The true task is not to delete words but to illuminate them: to show their history, their sting, their purpose, and, when possible, to rob them of their power through openness. Censorship does not rob words of their power; it makes them more alluring, more mysterious, and more dangerous in private mouths.
It is possible, and indeed desirable, to moderate cruelty in public discourse. But it is quite another matter to make certain syllables unsayable, as if human thought can be edited by an algorithm. We have seen where that road leads. It is not to civility but to Newspeak, where the boundaries of language become the boundaries of thought.
