By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, May 10, 2019
The rap on Singapore is that it has fertile capital but a
sterile culture — a great place to do business, but a stultifying place to
live.
It is the Facebook of countries.
The authorities there are sensitive to that kind of
criticism. In a 2017 interview with the Straits
Times, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong emphasized the diversity of the
country and the distinctiveness of its individual cultural components.
Singapore, he said, is oriented not toward assimilation
but integration.
“The result has been distinctive Singaporean variants of
Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Eurasian cultures, and a growing Singaporean
identity that we all share, suffusing and linking up our distinct individual
identities and ethnic cultures,” Lee said. “We certainly don’t wish Singapore
to be a first-world economy but a third-rate society, with a people who are
well off but uncouth. We want to be a society rich in spirit, a gracious
society where people are considerate and kind to one another, and as Mencius
said, where we treat all elders as we treat our own parents, and other children
as our own.”
That is a very nice vision, which the government of
Singapore pursues energetically through authoritarianism, bullying, and
intimidation. Singapore is an innovator in many fields, and one of the
activities toward which it has turned a great deal of attention is one that is
of increasing global and domestic significance: censorship.
Singapore has just passed a law that would require Facebook,
Twitter, and other social-media companies to publish corrections on their sites
in response to content that is ruled untrue by the government of Singapore.
Facebook executives say they have been looking to governments for guidance in
their attempt to suppress certain kinds of speech on their platforms — and here
it is, from the world-beating experts.
The government of Singapore is, in fact, not so different
in its thinking from Facebook. It is just a little ahead of the curve. Facebook
insists (sometimes laughably) that its speech restrictions are not directed at
unpopular political ideas but exist to serve the “safety” of the public.
Singapore, too, cites safety as it prohibits certain unwelcome political
activism and cultural innovation. “Public safety” is, like “national security,”
an almost infinitely plastic criterion in the hands of an entrepreneurial
politician: In March, President Donald Trump blocked the acquisition of
Qualcomm by Singapore-based Broadcom, offering only the vague explanation that
the company “might take action that threatens to impair the national security
of the United States.” Senator Marco Rubio has argued that corporate welfare
for Florida sugar barons is a matter of national security, while others make
the same argument for their favorite commodities; Democratic party officials
have suggested that Second Amendment activists be investigated or suppressed as
terrorists; the sniveling cowards who run the University of California at
Berkeley cited “public safety” when they forbade conservative polemicist Ann
Coulter to speak on campus. Et cetera ad nauseam.
In Singapore, “public safety” is the rationale for a
remarkably thorough program of official censorship, much of which is directed
at the worthy goal of keeping the peace among the city-state’s unamalgamated
ethnic and religious groups. For example, if a crime has a potentially
inflammatory ethnic or religious component, that fact generally will be omitted
from media coverage as part of an unspoken agreement between the state and the
newspapers. Films or books that are deemed to denigrate an ethnic or religious
group are prohibited. The sale of Malaysian newspapers is prohibited. And in
the same way that U.S. progressives seek to suppress political speech as a
matter of “campaign finance,” the authorities in Singapore have prohibited the
unlicensed showing of “party political films,” which may be the of “any person
and directed towards any political end in Singapore.” Such films are permitted
only if the government considers them objective; the irony of demanding a
subjective ruling about objectivity seems to have been lost on Singapore’s
rulers, who are not famous for their sense of humor.
Singapore’s censors make the same argument as do
Facebook’s: that the suppression of certain kinds of unwelcome political speech
is necessary for “public safety.” Singapore’s is a genuinely multiethnic and
multireligious society — and, as it turns out, such societies do not have a
very good record for long-term stability and domestic tranquility. If anything,
Singapore has a more convincing argument that fanning the flames of communal
politics in such a country is likely to actually endanger people than Facebook
does that Milo Yiannapoulos is whatever kind of danger it is that he is supposed to be. Singapore’s position is
more convincing than the jactitations of those ignorant little twerps at Philadelphia’s
University of the Arts who protested that the presence of Professor Camille
Paglia on their campus left them “unsafe.” (They should feel grateful. I wonder
who is the second-most distinguished
intellectual associated with that school.) You will not be surprised to learn
that the burdens here fall more heavily on dissidents and critics of the
government.
But let us give Singapore and Facebook the benefit of the
doubt and assume that they are motivated by concerns that are in the main to be
admired. The end results are no less risible: If American society is really so
fragile that Alex Jones presents an existential threat to the republic, then we
should send our British cousins a letter of apology and ask to be readmitted as
a colony, if they’ll have us. Likewise, if Singapore truly is going to be
rocked, and not in a good way, by a Katy Perry song (“I Kissed a Girl” was
prohibited as homosexual propaganda) then it is a pitiable little island
indeed, to quaver at such a colossus as that.
But, of course, almost no one takes seriously these
claims, just as no one seriously thinks that Ann Coulter is a “danger” to
anybody or that the NRA shares a genre with the Islamic State. These are
pretexts, and flimsy ones. They are fig leaves for ochlocracy.
But once censorship has been established in principle and
accepted in practice, then officiousness, triviality, and vindictiveness are
the inevitable outcomes. Bureaucracies — Singapore’s government, Facebook’s
management — have interests of their own, and agendas of their own, and tastes
of their own, and to take seriously the proposition that Facebook’s
speech-policing or U.S. “campaign finance” restrictions will be managed with
any more objectivity or neutrality than Singapore’s official state censorship
is to ignore almost everything we know about how bureaucracies actually work.
The powers that be at Facebook and Twitter may or may not be acting in good
faith, but the more important fact is that they could not be fair and neutral even if they sincerely wished to be.
This is a fact of organizational life, one that must be dealt with seriously.
The bland little caudillos down in Human Resources are creatures of an insipid
little culture all their own.
And that is the one that Facebook et al. propose we live
under.
Facebook is a private company, and it may of course as a
legal matter do whatever it pleases with its own platform, and Singapore’s
censorship is perfectly legal, too,
for what that’s worth — which is not very much: Some of the worst crimes against
humanity in modern history were carried out under the color of law. The
question of what may be done is distinct from the question of what should be
done.
Singapore’s censorship is quite defensible in principle —
if you accept censorship in principle — and the consequences of its policies
have been perfectly predictable. When the prime minister feels himself obliged
to go public with his insistence that local cultural conditions are not “third
rate,” it is an excellent indicator that they are obviously third-rate. Some lies are accidental advertisements for
the truth. There is much that is admirable about Singapore, but at its worst it
is a kind of splendidly air-conditioned fascist shopping mall. Public safety is
one of those good things it is possible to have too much of, and “graciousness”
enforced at the point of a bayonet is not graciousness at all.
Facebook, Twitter, et al. are houses divided: As
businesses they are one thing, as institutions they are another. Facebook
cofounder Chris Hughes argued in the pages of the New York Times on Thursday that Facebook should be broken up, in
part because of its failure to contain “violent rhetoric and fake news.”
Facebook and other “gargantuan companies,” he argued, are a threat to
democracy. That is hysteria, but it contains a measure of truth. Democracy
relies on discourse, and healthy discourse relies on a culture of open
exchange, which in turn requires a measure of confidence that Facebook’s
executives lack. Ironically, the problems of Facebook and, especially, of
Twitter are not so much threats to democracy but useful illustrations of the
shortcomings of unmediated democracy, in which the mob bullies the institutions
into submission. In a healthy democratic system, things work in roughly the
opposite way, with institutions helping to contain and redirect the excesses of
democratic passion. And that is where Facebook and Singapore differ: The
government of Singapore — which, whatever its shortcomings, seems to be run by
men who genuinely believe in their own precepts — serves no mob, but Facebook,
lacking the real conviction that can be rooted only in the permanent things, is
abject and quickly prone before whatever mob happens to show up at its door.
The American settlement under the First Amendment is
unusual to the point of being nearly unique. Censorship of different kinds is
the norm in civilized countries from Singapore to Germany, where certain
political parties, symbols, and ideas are strictly prohibited. The American
arrangement is different because it is the product of men who as individuals
and as a civilization believed in something, which gave them the confidence to
live in a world in which they are likely to hear and read things they did not
like from time to time, things that might even be wicked, scurrilous, or wrong.
Some men endure winter at Valley Forge, and some tremble at the menace of Katy
Perry or poor daft Laura Loomer.
There is a wonderful scene in Serenity, a science-fiction
film that is something of a libertarian manifesto, in which a fragile,
psychologically damaged girl is taken along on what amounts to an Old
West–style bank robbery, after which she and her friends are chased and nearly
captured by mutant space cannibals who mean to eat them raw on the spot. At the
end of a wild ride dodging fire in an open-air conveyance while speeding across
a Sergio Leone landscape, she returns to her overprotective older brother, who
asks if she is injured. She looks at him, wide-eyed, and says: “I swallowed a
bug.” Freedom tastes like that, sometimes.
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