On the whole I am in favor of freedom of expression, though sometimes I am equally in favor of freedom from expression. God preserve us from film stars telling us what they think about the situation in Somalia or the state of the rain forests in Borneo! There ought to be a law against it: as cobblers should stick to their last, film stars should stick to their lines.
Nor is there any denying that, overall, a degree of censorship is good for literature. It makes writers think harder; most great literature was created in conditions of censorship. Shakespeare could hardly have written about Elizabeth I in the way that Russell Brand, say, has written about Elizabeth II, but he managed to say quite a lot that’s worthwhile nonetheless, rather more in fact than Brand. Russian writers in the 19th century had to deal with [amazon asin=0974925381&template=*lrc ad (left)]censors, and on the whole didn’t make too bad a job of it: a far better job than most Western writers have made of dealing with their complete freedom.
Part of the reason that censorship, at least of a certain degree, is good for literature is that it makes writers approach subjects indirectly rather than head-on. The implicit is always much more powerful than the explicit because it requires more of the reader, and what we do for ourselves is more memorable than what others do for us. A Socratic dialogue is to be preferred to a catechism, at least once we have passed early childhood. The implicit demands[amazon asin=1500844764&template=*lrc ad (right)] of both writer and reader that they work harder, but the rewards are greater, at least artistically.
But some kinds and degrees of censorship destroy the possibility of literature. There is censorship of the kind that forbids the writer from saying certain things, and then there is the censorship that obliges writers to say certain things. The latter is much more destructive than the former, as the telling of deliberate lies is worse than not telling the whole truth (whatever the whole truth might be). It is far worse to have to say that the dictator is wonderful than to have to refrain from saying that he is terrible, or even that he has no clothes.
