archived forever in Google. LOL!

I was pointing out the obvious. You interpret
everything about Christianity with a negative twist.

No twisting necessary or involved.
The last 2000 years of your cult's bloody history speaks volumes.
How silly of you to imagine that genocide, executions, murders,
persecutions, and oppression are not negative.
Then again, it's what you christstains do best.

€€R.L.Measures wrote:

In article <mL6dnXDY6adM6OPenZ2dnUVZ_sadnZ2d@rogers.com>, "News Post"
<newsgroup@post.internet> wrote:

Elf M. Sternberg wrote:

Pastor Dave <1news-group-mail1@nospam-tampa-bay.rr.com> writes:

On 18 Nov 2005 15:06:56 -0800, "words of truth"
<wordsoftruth@hoshmail.com> spake thusly:

The Pornography Culture

David B. Hart

Can society set ethical, legal, or cultural limits on pornography
in the age of the Internet?

Yes, they absolutely can!

What part of "Congress shall make NO LAW" do you people not
understand?

Elf

I *think* that's about the practice of religion, not about licentious
pornography and smut. Funnily enough, the law makers have all but
outlawed religion from public places. Where people should be most
free to express their religiousity, they are being, instead,
persecuted and restricted.

** If the Bible's Song of Solomon is ever illustrated, it would have
to be quadruple-X rated.

No, it wouldn't be.

Elf M. Sternberg wrote:

Pastor Dave <1news-group-mail1@nospam-tampa-bay.rr.com> writes:

On 18 Nov 2005 15:06:56 -0800, "words of truth"
<wordsoftruth@hoshmail.com> spake thusly:

The Pornography Culture

David B. Hart

Can society set ethical, legal, or cultural limits on pornography in
the age of the Internet?

Yes, they absolutely can!

What part of "Congress shall make NO LAW" do you people not
understand?

Elf

I *think* that's about the practice of religion, not about licentious
pornography and smut.

Funnily enough, the law makers have all but outlawed
religion from public places. Where people should be most free to express
their religiousity, they are being, instead, persecuted and restricted.

What part of "Congress shall make NO LAW" do you people not
understand?

On 18 Nov 2005 15:06:56 -0800, "words of truth"
<wordsoftruth@hoshmail.com> spake thusly:

The Pornography Culture

David B. Hart

Can society set ethical, legal, or cultural limits on pornography in
the age of the Internet?

Yes, they absolutely can!

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/6/hart.htm


The Pornography Culture

David B. Hart




Can society set ethical, legal, or cultural limits on pornography in
the age of the Internet? And is this a reasonable or misguided
aspiration?
In light of the Supreme Court's end-of-term decision on legislation
aiming to regulate Internet pornography, The New Atlantis asked legal
scholar Jeffrey Rosen and theologian David B. Hart to comment.




Writing not as a lawyer, I am able to address the Supreme Court's
recent decision regarding the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) only
somewhat obliquely. Concerning the legal merits of the case,
certainly, I have little to say. This is not necessarily because I
believe one must be a lawyer to understand the Court's decision, but
because I am largely indifferent to the legal arguments contained
within it, and am convinced that even the question of whether or not
it was dictated by genuine constitutional concerns deserves very
little attention (as I shall presently argue).

I can begin, however, by confessing my perplexity at some of the
reasoning behind the court's majority ruling, most especially the
curious contention that COPA might prove to be unconstitutional on the
grounds that there exists filtering software that provides a "less
restrictive means" of preventing access to pornography on the
Internet and that does not involve "criminalizing" any particular
category of speech. Surely, if we are to be guided by logic, the
existence or nonexistence of such software (which is, after all,
merely a commercial product that parents may purchase and use if they
are so inclined and have the money) cannot possibly make any
difference regarding the question of whether the act violates
constitutional protections. Moreover, it is difficult for me to grasp
why the Court works upon the premise that whatever means are employed
to protect children from Internet pornography should involve the
barest minimum imposition possible upon the free expression of
pornographers.

Again, not being a lawyer, I have no idea what shadowy precedents
might be slouching about in the background of the Court's decision,
and I
am aware that the alliance between law and logic is often a tenuous
one. I can even appreciate something of the Court's anxiety
concerning the scope of the government's control over "free
expression," given that the modern liberal democratic state-with
its formidable apparatus of surveillance and legal coercion, and its
inhuman magnitude, and its bureaucratic procedural callousness, and
its powers of confiscation, taxation, and crippling prosecution, and
its immense technological resources-is so very intrusive,
sanctimonious, and irresistible a form of political authority. Allow
the government even the smallest advance past the bulwark of the
First Amendment, one might justly conclude, and before long we will
find ourselves subject to some variant of "hate speech" legislation,
of the sort that
makes it a criminal offense in Canada and Northern Europe for, say, a
priest to call attention publicly to biblical injunctions against
homosexuality. We have, as a society, long accepted the legal fiction
that we are incapable of even that minimal prudential wisdom necessary
to distinguish speech or art worthy of protection from the most
debased products of the imagination, and so have become content to
rely upon the abstract promise of free speech as our only sure
defense against the lure of authoritarianism. And perhaps, at this
juncture in cultural history, this lack of judgment is no longer
really a fiction.

In a larger sense, however, all human law is a fiction, especially law
of the sort adjudicated by the Supreme Court. As much as jurists might
be inclined to regard constitutional questions as falling entirely
within the province of their art, the Constitution is not in fact
merely a legal document; it is a philosophical and political charter,
and law is only one (and, in isolation, a deficient) approach to it.
Constitutional jurisprudence, moreover, is essentially a hermeneutical
tradition; it is not the inexorable unfolding of irrefragable
conclusions from unambiguous principles, but a history of willful and
often arbitrary interpretation, and as such primarily reflects
cultural decisions made well before any legal deliberation has begun.
And since legal principles-as opposed to exact ordinances-are
remarkable
chiefly for their plasticity, it requires only a little hermeneutical
audacity to make them say what we wish them to say (one never knows,
after all, what emanations may be lurking in what penumbras). Just as
the non-establishment clause might well have been taken-had our
society evolved in a more civilized direction-as no more than a
prohibition upon any federal legislation for or against the
establishment of religion, so the promise of freedom of speech might
have been taken as a defense of political or religious discourse, and
nothing more. There is certainly no good reason why "free speech"
should have come to mean an authorization of every conceivable form of
expression, or should have been understood to encompass not only words
but images and artifacts, or should have been seen as assuring either
purveyors or consumers of such things a right of access to all
available media or technologies of communication. We interpret it thus
because of who we are as a society, or who we have chosen to be; we
elect to understand "liberty" as "license." How we construe the
explicit premises enshrined in the constitution is determined by a
host of unspoken premises that we merely presume, but that also
define us. This is why I profess so little interest in the question
of the constitutionality of COPA; the more interesting question, it
seems to me, concerns what sort of society we have succeeded in
creating if the conclusions we draw from the fundamental principles
of our republic oblige us to defend pornographers' access to a medium
as pervasive, porous, complex, and malleable as the Internet against
laws intended to protect children.

The damage that pornography can do-to minds or cultures-is not by
any means negligible. Especially in our modern age of passive
entertainment, saturated as we are by an unending storm of noises and
images and barren prattle, portrayals of violence or of sexual
degradation possess a remarkable power to permeate, shape, and deprave
the imagination; and the imagination is, after all, the wellspring of
desire, of personality, of character. Anyone who would claim that
constant or even regular exposure to pornography does not affect a
person at the profoundest level of consciousness is either singularly
stupid or singularly degenerate. Nor has the availability and
profusion of pornography in modern Western culture any historical
precedent. And the Internet has provided a means of distribution
whose potentials we have scarcely begun to grasp. It is a medium of
communication at once transnational and private, worldwide and
discreet, universal and immediate. It is, as nothing else before it,
the technology of what Gianni Vattimo calls the "transparent
society," the technology of global instantaneity, which allows images
to be acquired in a moment from almost anywhere, conversations of
extraordinary intimacy to be conducted with faceless strangers across
continents, relations to be forged and compacts struck in almost
total secrecy, silently, in a virtual realm into which no
one-certainly no parent-can intrude. I doubt that even the most
technologically avant-garde among us can quite conceive how rapidly
and how insidiously such a medium can alter the culture around us.

We are already, as it happens, a casually and chronically pornographic
society. We dress young girls in clothes so scant and meretricious
that honest harlots are all but bereft of any distinctive method for
catching a lonely man's eye. The popular songs and musical spectacles
we allow our children to listen to and watch have transformed many of
the classic divertissements of the bordello-sexualized gamines,
frolicsome tribades, erotic spanking, Oedipal fantasy, very bad
"exotic" dance-into the staples of light entertainment. The
spectrum of wit explored by television comedy runs largely between the
pre- and the post-coital. In short, a great deal of the diabolistic
mystique that once clung to pornography-say, in the days when even
Aubrey Beardsley's scarcely adolescent nudes still suggested to most
persons a somewhat diseased sensibility-has now been more or less
dispelled. But the Internet offers something more disturbing yet: an
"interactive" medium for pornography, a parallel world at once
fluid and labyrinthine, where the most extreme forms of depravity can
be cheaply produced and then propagated on a global scale, where
consumers (of almost any age) can be cultivated and groomed, and where
a restless mind sheltered by an idle body can explore whole empires of
vice in untroubled quiet for hours on end. Even if filtering software
were as effective as it is supposed to be (and, as yet, it is not),
the spiritually corrosive nature of the very worst pornography is such
that-one would think-any additional legal or financial burden
placed upon the backs of pornographers would be welcome.

I am obviously being willfully nadve. I know perfectly well that, as a
culture, we value our "liberties" above almost every other good;
indeed, it is questionable at times whether we have the capacity to
recognize any rival good at all. The price of these liberties,
however, is occasionally worth considering. I may be revealing just
how quaintly reactionary I am in admitting that nothing about our
pornographic society bothers me more than the degraded and barbarized
vision of the female body and soul it has so successfully promoted,
and in admitting also (perhaps more damningly) that I pine rather
pathetically for the days of a somewhat more chivalrous image of
women. One of the high achievements of Western civilization, after
all, was in finding so many ways to celebrate, elevate, and admire
the feminine; while remaining hierarchical and protective in its
understanding of women, of course, Christendom also cultivated-as
perhaps no other civilization ever has-a solicitude for and a
deference towards women born out of a genuine reverence for their
natural and supernatural dignity. It may seem absurd even to speak of
such things at present, after a century of Western culture's sedulous
effort to drain the masculine and the feminine of anything like
cosmic or spiritual mystery, and now that vulgarity and
aggressiveness are the common property of both sexes and often
provide the chief milieu for their interactions. But it is sobering
to reflect how far a culture of sexual "frankness" has
gone in reducing men and women alike to a level of habitual
brutishness that would appall us beyond rescue were we not, as a
people, so blessedly protected by our own bad taste. The brief
flourishing of the 1970s ideal of masculinity-the epicene ectomorph,
sensitive, nurturing, flaccid-soon spawned a renaissance among the
young of the contrary ideal of conscienceless and predatory virility.
And, as imaginations continue to be shaped by our pornographic
society, what sorts of husbands or fathers are being bred? And how
will women continue to conform themselves-as surely they must-to our
cultural expectations of them? To judge from popular entertainment,
our favored images of women fall into two complementary, if rather
antithetical, classes: on the one hand, sullen, coarse,
quasi-masculine belligerence, on the other, pliant and wanton
availability to the most primordial of male appetites-in short,
viragoes or odalisks. I am fairly sure that, if I had a daughter, I
should want her society to provide her with a sentimental education
of richer possibilities than that.

My backwardness aside, however, it is more than empty nostalgia or
neurotic anxiety to ask what virtues men and women living in an ever
more pervasively pornographic culture can hope to nourish in
themselves or in their children. Sane societies, at any rate, care
about such things-more, I would argue, than they care about the
"imperative"
of placing as few constraints as possible upon individual expression.
But we have made the decision as a society that unfettered personal
volition is (almost) always to be prized, in principle, above the
object towards which volition is directed. It is in the will-in the
liberty of choice-that we place primary value, which means that we
must as a society strive, as far as possible, to recognize as few
objective goods outside the self as we possibly can.

Of course, we are prepared to set certain objective social and legal
limits to the exercise of the will, but these are by their very nature
flexible and frail, and the great interminable task of human
"liberation"-as we tend to understand it-is over time to erase
as many of these limits as we safely can. The irreducibly "good"
for us is subjective desire, self-expression, self-creation. The very
notion that the society we share could be an organically moral realm,
devoted as a whole to the formation of the mind or the soul, or that
unconstrained personal license might actually make society as a whole
less free by making others powerless against the consequences of the
"rights" we choose to exercise, runs contrary to all our moral and
(dare one say?) metaphysical prejudices. We are devoted to-indeed, in
a sense, we worship-the will; and we are hardly the first people
willing to offer up our children to our god.

The history of modern political and social doctrine is, to a large
degree, the history of Western culture's long, laborious departure
from Jewish, classical, and Christian models of freedom, and the
history in consequence of the ascendancy of the language of
"rights" over every other possible grammar of the good. It has
become something of a commonplace among scholars to note that-from at
least the time of Plato through the high Middle Ages-the Western
understanding of human freedom was inseparable from an understanding
of human nature: to be free was to be able to flourish as the kind of
being one was, so as to attain the ontological good towards which
one's nature was oriented (i.e., human excellence, charity, the
contemplation of God, and so on). For this reason, the movement of the
will was always regarded as posterior to the object of its intentions,
as something wakened and moved by a desire for rational life's proper
telos, and as something truly free only insofar as it achieved that
end towards which it was called. To choose awry, then-through
ignorance
or maleficence or corrupt longing-was not considered a manifestation
of freedom, but of slavery to the imperfect, the deficient, the
privative, the (literally) subhuman. Liberty of choice was only the
possibility of freedom, not its realization, and a society could be
considered just only insofar as it allowed for and aided in the
cultivation of virtue.

There would be little purpose here in rehearsing the story of how late
medieval "voluntarism" altered the understanding of freedom-both
divine and human-in the direction of the self-moved will, and subtly
elevated will in the sense of sheer spontaneity of choice (arbitrium)
over will in the sense of a rational nature's orientation towards the
good (voluntas); or of how later moral and political theory evolved
from this one strange and vital apostasy, until freedom came to be
conceived not as the liberation of one's nature, but as power over
one's nature. What is worth noting, however, is that the modern
understanding of freedom is essentially incompatible with the Jewish,
classical, or Christian understanding of man, the world, and society.
Freedom, as we now conceive of it, presumes-and must ever more
consciously pursue-an irreducible nihilism: for there must literally
be nothing transcendent of the will that might command it towards ends
it would not choose for itself, no value higher than those the will
imposes upon its world, no nature but what the will elects for itself.
It is also worth noting, somewhat in passing, that only a society
ordered towards the transcendental structure of being-towards the
true, the good, and the beautiful-is capable of anything we might
meaningfully describe as civilization, as it is only in the interval
between the good and the desire wakened by it that the greatest
cultural achievements are possible. Of a society no longer animated by
any aspiration nobler than the self's perpetual odyssey of
liberation, the best that can be expected is a comfortable banality.
Perhaps, indeed, a casually and chronically pornographic society is
the inevitable form late modern liberal democratic order must take,
since it probably lacks the capacity for anything better.

All of which yields two conclusions. The first is that the gradual
erosion-throughout the history of modernity-of any concept of
society as a moral and spiritual association governed by useful
ethical prejudices, immemorial reverences, and subsidiary structures
of authority (church, community, family) has led inevitably to a
constant expansion of the power of the state. In fact, it is ever
more the case that there are no significant social realities other
than the state and the individual (collective will and personal
will). And in the absence of a shared culture of virtue, the modern
liberal state must function-even if benignly-as a police state,
making what use it may
of the very technologies that COPA was intended somewhat to control.
And that may be the truly important implication of a decision such as
the Supreme Court's judgment on COPA: whether we are considering the
power of the federal government to penalize pornographers or the power
of the federal court to shelter them against such penalties, it is a
power that has no immediate or necessary connection to the culture
over which it holds sway. We call upon the state to shield us from
vice or to set our vices free, because we do not have a culture
devoted to the good, or dedicated to virtue, or capable of creating a
civil society that is hospitable to any freedom more substantial than
that of subjective will. This is simply what it is to be modern.

The second conclusion is that every time a decision like that
regarding COPA is handed down by the Court, it should serve to remind
us that between the biblical and the liberal democratic traditions
there must always be some element of tension. What either understands
as freedom the other must view as a form of bondage. This particular
Court decision is not especially dramatic in this regard-it is
certainly nowhere near as apocalyptic in its implications as Roe v.
Wade-and no doubt there are sound legal and even ethical arguments to
be made on either side of the issue, within the terms our society can
recognize. But perhaps the COPA decision can provide some of us, at
least, with a certain salutary sense of alienation: it is good to be
reminded from time to time-good for persons like me, with certain
pre-modern prejudices-that our relations with the liberal democratic
order can
be cordial to a degree, but are at best provisional and fleeting, and
can never constitute a firm alliance; that here we have no continuing
city; that we belong to a kingdom not of this world; and that, while
we are bound to love our country, we are forbidden to regard it as our
true home.