By Arun Mahizhnan

Arun Mahizhnan, Special Research Adviser, spoke at the Tembusu Forum at the National University of Singapore’s Tembusu College on 18 April 2013. The forum addressed issues of censorship and film classification in the context of the controversial film Porn Masala which was first banned for containing racial slurs and then released with a few cuts under R21 rating. Below, Arun’s speech.

PORN MASALA: BALANCING ARTISITC FREEDOM AND PUBLIC GOOD

What is at the heart of this discussion is government censorship for the good of the public.

Censorship is as old as the hills. Socrates was sentenced to drink hemlock in 399 BC for allegedly corrupting the youth of his time.

Governments before and since have considered censorship as a bounden duty of good governance to censor public communication in the name of public good. No government has ever abandoned censorship completely.  Every government tries to keep some form of censorship according to its perceived need for public good.

Censorship is not the brazen and blunt instrument of authoritarian states alone – as some may think. Even governments in the most liberal democracies have not disavowed censorship.

In my time as a student, reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the ultimate thrill as the book was banned in Singapore. And when I did not have to pretend to any literary merits, it was the Playboy magazine, smuggled from across the causeway.  In Johor Bahru, it was available for the asking. Not because censors there were more liberal but worse enforcers.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence was published in New York in 1959 and the US authorities tried to ban it.  The federal appeal court threw out the case. The following year, Penguin published the book in Britain and again the British authorities tried their best to bury the book.  A young government lawyer asked, “Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”, completely oblivious to the irony of his question. The protagonist in the novel is a gardener who makes torrid love to the master’s wife and uses expletives. The British court gave its stamp of approval and the book went on to be a best seller, presumably bought by many wives and servants.

So, long before Ken Kwek and his unholy allies, people of ‘similar bent’ have had to tussle with the government censor who bravely tries to prevent the pollution of the public sphere and the corruption of the morals of a good society.

But Ken’s sin is deemed more pernicious than moral corruption – he is on the verge of damaging racial harmony in Singapore. At least that is the mortal fear of the government censor. And not hers alone. The Films Consultative Panel, which the government earnestly consulted, made its own fear clear as crystal: an overwhelming number of members – 20 out of 24 of those present – declared the film must be banned. So it is not just a Civil Service decision but one based on a strong recommendation by what is considered community representation.

So the central question is: Do such scenes or films pose a major threat to racial harmony? Is this a reasonable fear or an imaginary one?

Every government has its own fears and its own assumed sensitivities. To go back to history again, one of the most liberal Western democracies, Sweden, does have a film censorship board, founded way back in 1911. And in case you think that this Board only classified the films – which indeed was what it did mostly – but not  banned or cut any films, think again: it did.  But the last time a film was cut was in 1995. The film was Martin Scorsese’s Casino. The scenes cut showed some people being bashed with baseball bats and buried alive. It was just too brutal and gruesome for the Swedish censor.

However, more specifically in reference to Ken Kwek’s film, we should note that Sweden too has regulation against hate speech.  In fact, most of Europe has very strong and specific regulations on hate speech which prohibit public statements that threaten or express disrespect for any group regarding their race, colour, faith or sexual orientation.
Thus Singapore is not alone or unusually finicky in its outlook over critical speech. However, it is obvious that all these countries differ in the way they formulate the rules and regulations and how they apply them in their multitude of contexts.  To my mind, that is precisely where our public discourse has to focus on.  Not whether there should be total freedom of speech or no censorship at all but how the limitations on freedom of speech need to be developed and applied in the Singapore context.

The Singapore government had long refused to settle for classification and community moderation, claiming the government had to do what was right and prudent. It took decades to change its stand.  However, the government would claim, as it often does, that it is merely responding to changing public norms.  Even in this particular case, the government proclaimed: “In classifying films, we seek to reflect prevailing community standards. We do not attempt to push the boundaries beyond what the community is prepared to accept, nor seek to defend a status quo when the community has moved past it.”

How does the government know what exactly does the community want? And is there just one particular maker of acceptance for the whole community? Or even if it is the majority view, should that always prevail over minority views?  These are some of the questions that should be discussed thoroughly.

Then we need to address a particularly tricky issue: Most people understand their right not to be offended. For example many members of the public do not want to see nudity thrust in their face in shopping malls, newspapers, television and so on. But when we classify films and put an advisory on nudity, do they have the right to go into such theatres and claim they are offended?  Surely not.

If that is the case for nudity, should we not apply similar contextual parameters for corrosive or hurtful speech as well? Is all corrosive speech unacceptable at all times and in all places?

There are indeed some things in life that are unacceptable at any time and in any place. Such as child pornography and, say, cannibalism. We are not going to indulge in child pornography or cannibalism, not because it is prohibited by the state but because it is revolting to us as normal human beings. No society condones those practices. But adult pornography and eating animal meat are definitely not the same.  Hundreds of millions of people are indulging in either or both because they are not as repulsive.

Thus we come back to the question of corrosive or hate speech and its context. There are several contexts in which such speech must be measured.

If the speech is inciting violence or hate, there would be a good case to prohibit it.

If the speech is commonplace – such as the numerous prejudicial and pejorative remarks we all hear most of our lives — and it is merely repeated by the characters in the film, the sting from that speech would have little shock value.

If the speech is always directed at just one ethnic group and not at any other, that would certainly be seen as a deliberate and concerted attack on that group.

If the speech is uttered as a reasoned – though prejudiced – and persuasive argument as opposed to throwaway lines, there could be a case for circumspection.

If the speech is ultimately aimed at hurt and not humour or satire, then there is reason to circumscribe it.

If the speech has no redeeming value at all, then it is not even speech.  It is blabber.

Thus we have to interrogate the speech and the context before we condemn it. As C S Lewis said, “What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.”

Having said all that, my final argument is going to make everything I had said so far quite irrelevant.  Everything I had said so far works only if there is a system that is subject to law and order. We are, and indeed, the whole world is, now entering a new planet called the cyberspace where rules and regulations by the state and the exhortations by the good and the holy leaders have little currency.  In the cyberspace, many people make their own rules and live by their own norms.  Not all of them bad, for sure. Many are, however, beyond the pale of conventional values and wisdom. In this space, the modus operandi is not to take on everyone and to make everything right. The more prudent modus is to change what you can, to tolerate what you can’t and have the wisdom to tell the difference.

No matter what governments do individually or even collectively, the quantity of bad speech is simply not going to disappear or even reduce. On the contrary, the assessment is that the quantity will increase because of the millions and millions of people entering the cyberworld every day. Today there are 2.5 billion people in this space.  There are more billions waiting to join.  No state and no technology is going to control all of them the way we were able to control the old media like newspapers, radio, television, the theatre and the cinema.  Governments thinking that control is the default mechanism ought to re-examine their position.  The new default position should be coping, not controlling.  We have to learn to cope with whatever public communications we are faced with, we have to learn to navigate them and negotiate with them. Putting it another way, regulate what is regulable.

If we can’t cope with one Ken Kwek, think what you’re going to do with 1000 Ken Kweks.  This is not an exaggeration. The new Ken Kweks will no longer need Cathay Organization to screen their films. They will not need any theatre.  They will penetrate thousands of personal screens at the press of a button. Remember the films by Martyn See on Singapore Rebel Chee Soon Juan and Said Zahari?  The government banned them first, and they went online and were seen by more people than likely would have been the case if they were screened in a theatre.

If the government tries to catch such film makers, they will go underground and still reach you. Only you can turn them off.  Not the nanny state.  Not the Films Consultative Panel.

The nanny state took a long time to delegate power to the community representatives.  Unfortunately for them, this too is too little, too late.  Their time too is running out.  The community representation model will be powerless when nothing stands between the producer and the consumer – who incidentally are one and the same in many cases. We call them prosumers.  This is the new world many young people are already inhabiting. They cannot be protected the way my generation was protected. They need to be educated on how to cope and not how to close their eyes.