Angel Tirado Essay

The ideas of freedom of speech, censorship and individuality in today’s global society

Censorship, freedom of speech and individuality are all still matters of great discussion in today’s society. What should be censored? What will affect other people? Perhaps there is much more individuality in today’s society than say 300 years ago. People in those days wouldn’t dare to be different from everybody else. They would all believe in the same things, and those who didn’t would be classed as outcasts and described as dangers to the rest of the society. Beliefs in religion were not to be discussed, this was all so fragile, he who questioned and refuted against the church would be condemned to serious misfortune and criticism in life. In Rome the general attitude was that only persons in authority, particularly members of the Senate, enjoyed the privilege of speaking freely. Public prosecution and punishment, supported by popular approval, occurred frequently. The Roman poets Ovid and Juvenal were both banished. Authors of seditious or scurrilous utterances or writings were punished. The emperor Caligula, for example, ordered an offending writer to be burned alive, and Nero deported his critics and burned their books.
There is hardly a matter of public concern that does not, sooner or later, raise the issue of liberty. The use and abuse of drugs, crime and punishment, pornography and obscenity, industrial and economic controls, racial and sexual equality, national security and defence, ecology, technology, bureaucracy, education, religion, the family, sex-all come up against the ultimate test: the liberty of the individual. Inevitably the elevation of the idea of liberty has led to the debasement of the idea of authority. Deprived of legitimacy, of any presumption of right, authority is reduced to nothing more than the exercise of power or force. ‘What we are left with then,’ as John Stuart Mill bequeathed to us, ‘is the idea of the free and sovereign individual.’...