To begin with, his critics make the stunningly negligent error of equating religion with race. As Harris points out in a response to unscrupulous readings of this piece, he is not focusing on skin colour, and he suggests twice that he himself should be profiled. In other words, he is not talking about race, and even if he were, he wouldn’t be making any supremacist claims. So how some of Harris’s readers have managed to conclude from this article that he is a bigot and a racist is beyond me. These people must either lack the most fundamental reasoning skills or seek the ruin of his reputation.

What such critics do is a dangerous thing, not to be taken lightly. Accusations of racism, sexism, and other prejudicial beliefs can put the accused’s public image beyond repair, so we should avoid using that language until firm evidence supports us. Harris’s detractors, however, use it unhesitatingly, and justify themselves with readings that do not stand up to scrutiny.

As Harris stresses in a longer article about these ‘trolls’, he doesn’t have time to respond to all of his critics, no matter how easy it is to refute their points. However, they will always misrepresent him regardless. The problem with writing is its permanence. As soon as text appears on the internet or in a book, it is no longer in the writer’s hands. Be assured that people will misquote you, misread you, and consequently misjudge you. At best, your little contribution to moral philosophy remains forever a reflection of your beliefs at a single moment in time. At worst, something you never said is attributed to you indefinitely.

But my opinions are as alive and organic as my body and my brain. My opinions will age with me. I started to develop them at birth and I will rest with them when I die. Some I will shed like a defunct outer skin; others form the backbone of my identity. There is no way I can guarantee that, ten years from today, I will stand by this article or anything else I have written for Spilt Inc. I know already that, were I to rewrite some of my pieces published here, I would approach the subject from another angle. In at least one case, I would arrive at a different conclusion. My opinions are alive, but my writings are the dead parts of me.

Some will continue to argue that the author is fully accountable for prejudicial readings and suggest that more careful wording would limit misunderstanding. But experience suggests otherwise: often there is little observable connection between the quality and accuracy of writing and the scale of misreading. At the same time, it is unsatisfactory to absolve authors of responsibility for their texts. We could then say what we like without having to worry about reprisal.

All of us are amateurs in moral philosophy, but if you have ever tried to write about contentious ethical imperatives, if you have attempted to present a case from a perspective hitherto ignored, if you have spoken in the tones of a marginal voice, perhaps you have also felt what I feel. I fear writing about these things. I fear that what I say will be ripped from its context, misrepresented in summary. I see what has happened to Harris and I wonder whether the same fate befalls all writers eventually.

Another author whom I admire, Christopher Hitchens, has also received disingenuous reviews for prose innocent of the charges levied against it. Sadly, Hitchens is no longer around to defend himself against offensives on his public image. Who remains to do it? Only other authors. For the same reason that I fear writing, then, I feel as though I have to write. As long as some critics continue maliciously with their misrepresentations and distortions, as long as something is imperfectly understood or still to be explained, writing is a necessity, not a choice.

Returning to these texts, which are the foundation for those of us who aspire to a classless society, reminded me what revolution should mean. Unsurprisingly, this is nearly antithetical to what it has come to mean. It provides just one instance of the way in which political writers and speakers have transfigured our language so that we can no longer imagine ourselves into a politically effective way of life.

What counts as a revolution now? If Cameron is to be believed, it is a selection of policies that will have a tangible impact on the lives of people who inhabit certain economic groups. I don’t mean to suggest here that the effects of his plan on these citizens’ standard of living will be negligible and are unworthy of interest. What I’d like to emphasise, rather, is how far politicians have devalued the concept of revolution, so precious to an oppressed society.

In Marx, revolution is the complete overhaul of the capitalist system. It is the equalisation of the two classes: the owners and the workers, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In short, it is the immense collective activity that ends the era of coercive corporations and begins the utopian project of socialism. For Cameron, revolution is a kind of medicine the government forces down the throat of its working population. For Marx, it is the weapon that the working population can wield against those who try to do such a thing.

Some will offer the usual rebuttal. They will say that capitalism has outlasted the communist challenge, that we need to revise our notions of what is and isn’t possible. Others of us still dare to dream that one day, and maybe not in our lifetimes, the rich-poor gap will recede, the multinational will cease to exploit the poorer nation’s workforce, the labourer will no longer have to face the product of his or her labour as something lost, something alienated.

In fact, what politicians like Cameron are doing to our language is more than a shame –  it is outright dangerous. Their constant redefinition of those words that inspire action makes that action impossible. When we no longer have the creative tools at our disposal, we cannot effect real change either. If, in other words, Marx’s aim to create a wholly classless society seems hyperbolic to you, then you have probably lost the ability to dream about such a thing too.

When we are asked to consider the ‘vulnerable in society’, that class so often the target of governmental sympathy, we tend to think of the sick and the elderly. Much less often are we asked to consider the plight of today’s young people. But a report recently compiled by the Intergenerational Foundation points emphatically at the conclusion that this rhetoric of vulnerability has overwritten.

It argues that, in the post-war period, developed countries have engaged in ‘fiscal child abuse’. It also charts, most interestingly, the acceleration of this exploitative practice in the current economic climate. Its index, which starts in 1990, illustrates that, since then, UK governments have persistently targeted young people to fund the welfare of older generations and the rich.

When we view David Cameron’s current ‘welfare revolution’ through this frame of reference, it does not appear revolutionary at all. His plans to cut housing benefits for under-25s are both pernicious and historically repetitive. If you were one of the students whom his hiked tuition fees deterred from higher education this year, you should expect even less financial support from him now, as you try to find work in his uninviting economy. But then the prospect is no better if you were prepared to pay for university. Arguably, it is worse. If Cameron’s ideas materialise, next year’s students will graduate with more debt and less governmental aid.

Young people make a useful target for these abusive politics. Low voting turnout means that, if they face the sort of discrimination we are seeing today, they are unlikely to react in a politically meaningful way. It also means that their voice, which would no doubt dissent, goes unheard. The Intergenerational Foundation’s index takes as one of its components the average age of councillors. This has risen without interruption since 1997, when the Local Government Association began to track the data. The reduced voting turnout in General Elections over the last two decades is also more pronounced in younger people, the study shows.

Surely we need to explore the argument that the exploitative welfare offensive on young people is indirectly responsible for their lack of participation. Such a perspective would posit that the only revolution taking place today is an endless, cyclical movement in which the oppression of the young leads to a political silence that seemingly legitimises that oppression.

Nothing petrifies Western society quite like the prospect of offending the religious, and perhaps it is because our politicians and public figures would rather circumvent the issue that we cannot hold a wider debate on the remit of theology in politics, even at this crucial time.

The prevailing view at the moment is that the legalisation of same-sex marriage would sever the bond between the church and the state. To begin with, this is only half true: the government’s consultation on same-sex marriage still proposes ‘to maintain the legal ban on same-sex couples marrying in a religious service’. It is also presumed that uncoupling the church and state is necessarily a bad thing, but their mere partition would be, I argue, insufficient. What we need is a thorough, disinterested critique of theocracy, and while the government holds the Church of England in this ambivalent embrace, we cannot hope for it.

If same sex marriage is not going to be allowed in a religious service, then I would like to know why not. That remains unanswered. Because seemingly, if a commandment was scribbled down in a book thousands of years ago, it should pass unquestioned today. If a claim is universal, as a religious one must be, that seems to exempt it from investigation, when it is precisely that sort of remark that we need to examine most closely.

We have at last evolved into a moral state in which we consider same-sex marriage acceptable. This being so, why are we so afraid to assert the universality of our own truth? Why is same-sex marriage prohibited within churches, mandated without? The only explanation, again, is the privilege unreasonably accorded to religious traditions. I do not have to refute the religious argument. I have only to say that it holds no prior advantage over any other belief system, including my own atheistic one. Religion is special in no way — except perhaps in that, given the lack of evidence it uses to substantiate the magnitude of the claims it makes, it has attracted a surprising amount of followers, attention, and respect.

Regardless of its origin, every moral statement requires justification, and when that is given, we may begin to apply it to what really happens in our lives. We have found that the prohibition of same-sex marriage is now below our moral standard. Thus we should allow this ritual everywhere. No exceptions.

For a whole nation of people to understand its shared history, to coordinate the body of a collective self, national identity cannot appear to be in constant flux. It is, therefore, also something in a perpetual state of disrepair, since stabilising one area of the national identity merely transfers the stress and incurs fractures elsewhere on its surface. Hence we can inhabit a ‘broken Britain’ that, this month, has manifested itself whole, intact. The view of identity that focuses on what social groups share is continuous, in the words of cultural critic Stuart Hall. It is imaginary and static: a fictional narrative of unity inspired by a make-believe coherence.

The recurrence of ahistorical symbols is a trope of this genre and is largely responsible for the inertial atmosphere of its satisfying but dangerous works. The visual language of the English national identity is tightly regulated, and in this sense the Diamond Jubilee is a celebration of our pedantry. This month, the ubiquitous face of Elizabeth Windsor has provided a stable cover for a nation that is deeply ambivalent towards itself, the Union Flag and the Cross of St George, rendering the individuals who display them anonymous, performing the same role. It is the sheer endurance of that first figure that we acknowledge, the incredible stasis that her sixty years have conferred upon her subjects and their identities.

We often hear it said that the monarch is ‘only a figurehead’, that political and economic power remains in the hands of the democratically elected. The second statement is naive; the first is deceptive. For if the research into discourse has not reiterated its ability to empower or to marginalise, what has it done at all? One is never only a figure. Rather, one has to be a figure to attain power in the first place. The figure is not the impotent representation of the real. It is the powerful form of the self. Let it not be said that the Queen, being only a figure, is an empty gesture. As Head of the Church, the State, and the Army, she is charged to the highest degree with meaning.

In an increasingly global world, one in which the system of late capital has become decentred and in which migrations of people are both wide and widely documented, the stasis of the signifier is a dream. That is in part why we dream it recurrently. But the assembly of this fiction requires us first to disassemble what is real about us, to impart an imaginary coherence on the conflicting experiences of everyday life. I do not intend for others to associate me with the Crusades. Neither do I wish to celebrate the reign of any non-elected Head of State. What I would like, however, is a mode of cultural expression that legalises the free entry and exit of signifiers from its lexicon. One that recognises the power of the figure and in doing so makes possible a real, not a fictional, democracy.

‘Everyone in the debate is opposed to outright infanticide—that is taking a live child and deciding to kill them because they’re too much trouble to take care of, and everyone agrees on that. Everyone agrees, I suppose, that women are allowed to wash their hands, although I guess you could make a case, if you went over to the biology department, that when a woman washes her hands, lots of cells flake off and some future technology might be able to use the information in those cells to construct a potential child. So somewhere between, say, washing your hands and killing your three-year-old, somewhere between them there are decisions to be made about how we’re going to balance what we call “life”, which is in fact there in the cells in your hands, against lots of other problems. People who say, “Well I know it’s this number of days,” can’t be taken seriously.’

I begin with Noam Chomsky’s comments about abortion because, admirably, he contributes in a manner we rarely see. Rather than whipping up a passion for or against abortion, Chomsky takes the heat out of the debate, readjusts the perspective. Unlike seemingly everyone else, he refuses to be certain, arguing instead that certainty can only be based on simplistic and contradictory reasoning. He reminds us that life is full of conflicting values. He warns us of those who are certain. But if we agree with Chomsky, then a new problem confronts us. If we accept, as it’s so unlike us to do, that we cannot know what is right, that we must ignore certain moral absolutes if we wish to act, that there is at least no easy answer and perhaps no answer at all, then how, in the real world, do we make decisions about unborn children?

I am talking about action beyond the theoretical domain. So much intellectual effort on the issue of abortion goes to waste in this trivial, unreal space. As Chomsky points out in the same interview, it’s hard to take seriously many people who actively protest about abortion, either for or against it. How many of them also support, for instance, the USA’s military intervention? And how many of them, therefore, are serious, really serious, about the lives of women and children? You simply cannot support the USA’s brutal neoliberalist project, dividing rich and poor across the globe, and at the same time take an ethical interest in the abortion question. Do the protestors really care about the foetus and the mother? Or do they only care about the American foetus and the American mother?

If we’re unable to answer the question, we can at least reduce the number of times we need to ask it. As Chomsky notes and as I think all of us are aware, abortion rates decrease as education becomes more available. Why don’t the protesters demand that the government helps fund sexual education programmes, both in their own country and across the world? Again they force me to question how serious they really are about human life. We should be indignant about these people and their attitudes. Even without agreement on the ethics of abortion, we can make a real difference to real lives. It seems their blinding rage drives them well off the track.

There’s also the feeling that, once we’ve answered the difficult question about abortion, only easy ones will remain. Intellectual enquiry on this point suggests otherwise. An article about abortion recently published in the Journal of Medical Ethics generated an uproarious response, to the extent that one of its writers received death threats. The article contends that, in all cases where a foetus may be aborted, a newborn child may also be killed. It moves to this conclusion by asserting that the foetus and a very young child have the same moral status. In the authors’ words, both are potential rather than actual persons, and as such, the concerns of mothers, fathers, and even of the state should take precedence.

According to Dr Giubilini and Dr Minerva, the academics behind this paper, killing a newborn is as acceptable as killing a foetus because, even shortly after birth, the child will not yet have developed aims. Life becomes valuable, they argue, when taking it away represents a loss, so until a human being invests him or herself with potentiality, which doesn’t occur immediately after birth, he or she isn’t a person in a morally relevant sense. The moral status of the infant and the newborn is equal, and consequently it’s as permissible to kill the newborn as it is to kill the foetus. They propose to call this form of infanticide ‘after-birth abortion’.

An interesting argument, but many disagree. It isn’t my aim here to explicate their premises any further or to come down on one side. I include this argument only because it proves that, even if we work out whether abortion is morally right, tough questions remain. In a hypothetical world in which we have legalised abortion, must we also accept after-birth abortion? Giubilini and Minerva seem to think so, but it’s complex. Surely it’s foreseeable that, in this potential world, a question about the status of the foetus and the newborn will divide people in the same way that its prior question has.

Sections from the interview with Noam Chomsky are accessible here. The video also features Peter Singer, whose philosophy heavily influenced Dr Giubilini and Dr Minerva’s arguments. Their article in the Journal of Medical Ethics can be found here.

Never underestimate the ability of the oppressor to conjure up a justification when finally we recognise it has abandoned reason. In a report on women’s sport in Saudi Arabia, Human Rights Watch compiles the regime’s explanations, religious and political, as to why women shouldn’t be allowed to partake in certain physical activities. The government’s rhetoric is at best ambiguous, but the promulgations of its ideological police, who are as integral to the regime as its overt policy makers, are more decisive.

A personal favourite came from Sheikh Abdullah al-Mani’, an advisor at the Royal Court. In May 2010, he said that sports such as football or basketball, which involve too much movement and jumping, will harm any virgin girl who plays. Sheikh Dr. Abd al-Karim al-Khudair, who sits on the only body that may arbitrate on the correct interpretation of Sharia in the kingdom, has said that calls to open women’s sports clubs and improve their health are ‘steps of the devil’. It is a view generally held that women’s sport outside of private environments would lead to inappropriate contact with other men, including male spectators.

A select number of religious scholars and political figures, we should note, are opposed to this restriction. But Saudi Arabia is the third most obese nation in the world, ahead of even the United States, and still we await a demonstrable change in the government’s attitude towards women’s sport.

It came as no surprise then, when the Saudi Arabia Olympic Committee recently ruled out sending women athletes to this year’s Games. Prince Nawaf bin Faisal, who leads this body, said that they ‘are not endorsing any Saudi female participation at the moment in the Olympics or other international championships’. This ruling comes much to the consternation of the International Olympic Committee, which is now facing calls to ban Saudi Arabia from the Games. They’d hoped that London 2012 would be the first to see female participation by every country. Even Brunei and Qatar, the two other states that have never sent female athletes to the Games, look set to represent both sexes later this year.

But even if Saudi Arabia were to include a woman in its final squad, we shouldn’t be so easily satisfied. Whatever the kingdom’s final determination, it’s already clear that any attending woman cannot function as an athlete. She will be a token gesture, nothing more, and we must reject any such symbolic appeal. The tokenisation of the female athlete is yet another regression, a movement backwards, a true step of the devil. The real danger, though, is that it salves the Saudi conscience. This is a kingdom in which male chauvinism and female submission are actively encouraged. We shouldn’t absolve it for a meaningless appeal. Now, at a moment of international pressure, it’s imperative that we decline insincere propitiations.

The same for Brunei and Qatar, which mustn’t beguile the International Olympic Committee. The Games don’t just bring together some of the most accomplished sportspeople on the globe; they inspire athletes the world over. They feed the grassroots. But in these bleak states, and for many people, no grass grows. Token attendance at London 2012 can but provide an excuse for countries like Saudi Arabia to continue their sickening oppression of women longer still.

However, I think it’s necessary to mount a defence. Not of the deliberately rude, combative behaviour that Siobhain cites in her article, but of the many atheists who, even in the present day, feel unable to express their criticisms of religion. Theists are regularly pitied when their purportedly harmless beliefs are attacked, but atheists never seem to receive the same sympathy for the impossible situation that, should they wish to speak out against religion, confronts them.

Let’s not forget that atheists, too, are capable of taking offense. My own opposition to religion results largely from the demeaning remarks it makes about humanity. When I’m told that, without a divine superintendent, I wouldn’t know right from wrong; that unless I submit myself completely to a distant, ineffable ruler, I will suffer an eternity of pain and torture, and rightfully so; that homosexuals are immoral, women should be subservient, and everyone was born in original sin, I also have a right to be offended.

Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate and physicist, spoke for many atheists when he declared, ‘Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.’ It’s not for me, here, to recapitulate the countless arguments brought against both the verity and goodness of religion. It’s not even important that you agree with them. All that needs to be stated is that many of us are passionately opposed to what we view as harmful, demeaning, prejudicial dogma.

I can criticise someone’s political beliefs in strong terms, and that’s acceptable. I can call George Bush wholly incompetent, condemn his Conservatism, accuse his military strategy of gross crimes against humanity, and in the eyes of many, I’d be saying something fairly unexceptional. I can publish an extremely disapproving review of an artistic work, or lambast someone’s football team for their performance at the weekend, and that’s fine as well. But should I speak about a religion in those terms, using a similar language, society will refuse to hear me. Theistic belief systems are accorded a privilege that no other, from politics to aesthetics to sport, shares.

But even without the automatic disapproval of much of society, it’s difficult to reject religion tactfully. Can you think of a nice way to tell someone that the premises on which his or her entire world outlook is founded are both false and immoral? It’s impossible to denounce a theory of everything in part; it must be taken on as a whole. The nature of the claim determines the nature of the critique. However you try, it’s difficult not to come across as rude or insensitive or militant when you speak out against religion.

It’s also worth remembering that not all points on our side are as valid as they initially appear. Often, articles written against the death penalty condemn it on false grounds. It’s regularly argued, for example, that the death penalty is a racist penalty. This is true, and appallingly so. According to a report by Amnesty International in 2003, black and white people in the USA are victims of murder in about equal number, but 80% of those put to death since 1976 (when the death penalty was reinstated) have been convicted of crimes involving white victims, compared to the 13% charged with killing black ones. Figures relating to the race of the defendant tell a similar story, and many other studies arrive at the same conclusion. The problem we find here, however, concerns a judicial system that applies itself in a discriminatory fashion and not capital punishment. Its proponents would suggest, in response to this argument, a sort of equal-opportunity death sentence, and while admittedly that’s an improvement on the racially motivated killings we have today, it doesn’t meet the exact aims of our project.

The death penalty is hierarchical, it is also said. Poorer defendants, unable to afford proper representation, face conviction in cases where more affluent ones don’t. Leonard Rojas, who was sentenced to death in 1996, couldn’t afford a lawyer for his appeal, so the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals appointed him one. But this lawyer had never handled such an appeal before; he’d also been sanctioned in the past for neglecting clients and was, at the time, undergoing treatment for serious mental illness. Many of the claims in his report were inappropriate and, as a result, his client wasn’t allowed the possibility of federal review. Accordingly, Rojas was executed on the 4th of December 2002. An appalling story, but again this refers to a greater problem. While it exemplifies clearly the injustices that follow when the law is more interested in your ability to pay than your actions, it doesn’t necessarily affirm the immorality of capital punishment.

We should also avoid reductive arguments about the symbolic value of the death penalty. This is a tactic that the other side often employs, and we mustn’t descend to its level. No doubt the institutional, systematic killing of law-breakers can be analysed figuratively; it’s not for us, though, to dehumanise further those victims by exchanging their worth as individuals for their value as symbols. For instance, proponents have often suggested that the death sentence represents the absolute, irreversible power of the state, or sometimes they’ll hope to use the executed criminal as an example to the rest of society. In reply, I’d like to ask whether they could teach that lesson without the arbitrary murder of one of their citizens. Human beings are never examples. So let’s not ourselves commit the same crime. When we abolish human sacrifice, we can perhaps smile at a symbolic victory over the tyrannous state, but what we should exalt in is the real freedom we’ve created for real people and their families.

And it’s precisely this issue, the significance of human life, that we must reconsider if we seek to repudiate the concept of capital punishment. Even though we allow the state, through its judicial system, the means to assess a criminal by its own laws; the authority to discipline, to punish, and to incarcerate; the final say on what is right and wrong within its borders, we should never grant it the power it to murder us. If a state is able to kill its own citizens lawfully, then it has become a dictator, a tyrant, a god; it has become too powerful.

It’s in this way that governments are deified. After all, for the religious, the potency of god is predicated on his ownership of both existence and nonexistence, his sovereignty over life and death, his ability to give breath to you and take it from you when he sees fit. The prevalence of the death penalty in theocratic countries is therefore no surprise, and we shouldn’t be shocked either that it persists in the United States, China, and North Korea. These are all states that, by day, assert complete power over their people and, by night, dream of a similar authority over the rest of the world. But let’s have more self-respect than to entrust any leader to decide which of us deserve life and which don’t. You are more valuable than that.

Channel 4 is currently showing a documentary series on the death penalty in America. The first episode, which aired on Thursday 22nd of March, is viewable here: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/death-row/4od. The next episode is on today at 10pm.

If today we found ourselves the rulers of a new state, a nation created afresh, how would we attend to censorship? Socrates, who performs as his author’s mouthpiece, articulates the above view. This passage speaks with relevance to us in the 21st Century for many reasons, not least because the representation of religious figures remains contentious. It was only in 2005 that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad and incited protest from across the Muslim world. But Plato’s insight interests me for other reasons. When he picks up the issue of allegory, he deals with, I think, the key principle of the debate. If I were a ruler, drafting my own censorship laws, I would begin there.

After all, nowadays we too easily forget that art is capable of allegory or instruction. If a film shows drug abuse or a game depicts gun crime, that alone is enough to restrict viewership. In review columns, books that deal with potentially offensive material still receive criticism for it, and songs with swearing remain banned on FM radio. The mere representation of profanity in art has become sufficient for its censorship, it seems.

But isn’t it possible that art can portray something without condoning it? I don’t think many of us leave performances of Hamlet with a desire to wreak vengeance on our enemies, read the final page of A Clockwork Orange and resolve to lead a life of crime, or pause our game of Grand Theft Auto and proceed to commit indiscriminate killings. If it’s proven that exposure to these stimuli is enough, in rare cases, to catalyse such reactions (and some already argue this), then we’d have to factor that in. But that’s still no excuse to ignore the didactic value of art.

Because, in a way, when we ask whether violent games, films, or books really contribute to the murderer’s mentality, we pose only the first half of what needs to be a two-part question. We never seem to ask how often art has in fact deterred an immoral act. And if we want to answer that, then we must attend to its instructive function.

For example, what is the allegory, the lesson, of Goodness Gracious Me’s sketch ‘Going Out for an English’? Superficially, the piece is about an Indian family and its mocking of English culture — which, by the current logic of censorship, would make a valid case for the clip’s restriction. But as soon as we realise that this is comedy, that what it ridicules is neither the English nor the Indian, but the more general act of stereotyping, it’s obvious that this is no harmful sketch. Goodness Gracious Me may have angered some viewers and provoked complaints at the time, but in our community we’d allow it. What, then, would we censor?

I’d like to think that we wouldn’t accept The Bachelor, whose most recent series aired at the end of last year on Channel 5. It purported to find a partner for bachelor Gavin Henson and, on the surface, showed little that is obviously unethical. It’s unlikely to rouse an impressionable member of the community to sudden violence, but its structure suggests a problem deeper rooted. The Bachelor reinforces the male as dominant, determining. The man occupies the centre and chooses which of the submissive females he will accept. There is no self-reflexive critique. Silently rather, it perpetuates a certain sort of power structure that we might have hoped was on its way out.

The didactic is now often overlooked, but I’d suggest that our moral landscape would be quite different today if each work of literature, film, art, or music didn’t tend to it in some way. It’s a question not of form or content alone, but of their synthesis, of the total structure that is responsible for our aesthetic experience. As soon as we apply critical pressure to a text, it renders visible the moral imperatives that don’t appear on its surface.

So I seem therefore, to be in disagreement with Plato. Where he suggests that some art is allegorical and some is not, I reply that the great, cumulative, international body of art together has produced the moral world that we inhabit. It would of course be nice to live in a state that has no need for censorship, but until we become a perfect humanity, harmful media will persist. In the meantime we as rulers will have to make difficult decisions about what to permit and what to restrict. But we can’t make progress until we re-enter the instructive dimensions of art.