Music and Censorship (Question 2) the Most

Music and Censorship (Question 2)

The most "dangerous" aspect of art, or at least the aspect of art most threatening to entrenched power, is the way in which art is able to point out how all meaning is socially constructed, and that there is nothing inherent to reality constituting borders or boundaries of human thought or action. In order to see how this is the case, one need only look as far as the reaction garnered by the publication of political cartoons featuring an image of Muhammad, the central prophetic figure in one of the human species' three main fictional accounts of reality.

In his play The Pillowman, Martin McDonough notes that "some art is shit and some art is dangerous," and the cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Politiken featuring images of Muhammad turned out to be both, although the latter aspect of them is perhaps the more important (in terms of the former, the cartoons simply used hackneyed, easy jokes, that, regardless of how much one might care about an imaginary space god and his Earthly representatives, should offend anyone with an appreciation of skillful humor). The cartoons sparked "widespread protests by Muslims in various countries" as well as "an alleged plot to kill cartoonist Kurt Westergaard" (BBC, 2010). Responses to this uproar varied, with one of the most popular being an acknowledgment of the paper's right to print the cartoons coupled with an entreaty for "sensitivity" to religious beliefs. This latter aspect was summed up by French Theologian Sohaib Bencheikh, when he claimed that "one must find the borders between freedom of expression and freedom to protect the sacred" (Moore, 2006). However, Bencheikh's statement and others like it are nonsense, because they rely on an understanding of the world that is wholly independent from reality (he is, after all, a theologian).

Artists should be given free reign in the producing and displaying of works that are offensive, objectionable, and disparaging of certain people's beliefs and values, because this is pretty much the purpose of art. The only responsibility an artist has to society is to reveal the way in which all meaning is socially constructed by challenging outdated assumptions and beliefs. When Bencheikh says "freedom to protect the sacred," he really means freedom from being criticized for believing laughably simple and easily disproven things about the nature of objective reality. Religious belief is simply socially acceptable superstition and fairy logic, and it is socially acceptable precisely because the society which accepts it has been shaped and conditioned by religion through centuries of violence and coercion.

Thus, just as the artist has no responsibility to society except to demonstrate society's fictional nature, society has no responsibility to the artist, except perhaps to censor the artist as a means of maintaining power through the obfuscation of society's roots in distinctly human cultural production. The most effective way of maintaining power is by making the distribution of the power appear inherent, and religion, through its avoidance of logic and evidence, subsequently claims that the authority given to societies almost entirely shaped by religion (despite the frequent claims by the religious that they are ostracized or otherwise disenfranchised) is itself inherent.