Philosophy of Liberty

Although he falls a bit short at the end, and although he neglects to mention Cameron's support for Page Three, Tim Stanley writes:

Consider this blog an open letter to all my Right-wing friends.

I can’t understand why on Earth a "conservative" would reject out of hand the Government’s modest plans for regulating access to internet pornography. And yet there's a lot of criticism of the very idea of censorship or filtering coming from the Right on Twitter.

Comrades, hardcore violent porn that degrades women, corrupts the minds of children and tears our society apart is not a “free speech” issue. To call it such is to equate the rights of artists and dissidents with the rights of smut peddlers and pimps, and they’re just not the same.

Moreover, we on the Right might be capitalists by instinct, but we surely cannot support the commodification of bodies. The whole point of conservatism is to conserve – to conserve order, social stability, the family, tradition and the sacred.

Without these things we have anarchy; anarchies lead to tyrannies and tyranny is bad for the individual. You can’t have liberty without moral order. To maximize liberty we must have a healthy culture. And, QED, we must regulate porn.

Don’t take my word for it, ask Margaret Thatcher. In the short clip above she is asked if the internet is a danger to society. She says that in the abstract the answer is “no”, because science is morally neutral. But the Lady goes on to argue that man has the capacity to pervert science, to use it for nefarious ends that harm all of us:

“Example, the new internet. You can get the most wonderful messages, the most marvellous music, the most marvellous art across the internet. You can also get pornography and sadism, and we have to pass laws to stop that … I think that most people who say ‘We would like a decent, respectable, well ordered society if we could choose to live in it.’”

Amen.

I don’t think that Mrs Thatcher meant to sound blimpish. Her brand of Methodism tended towards a radical interpretation of free will, which is partly what made her such a firm supporter of free markets.

But, as she once put it, “liberty must never be confused with licence” – largely because licence leads to disorder and disorder itself undermines liberty. In other words, it is perfectly possible to be an economic libertarian but still recognize the need for the community to regulate certain social relations.

I’m sure that the passionately Christian Mrs Thatcher never hoped or imagined that her philosophy of liberty would be used by future generations to create a public sphere that offers children unfiltered access to Japanese Bukkake porn.

And yet, worryingly, that is how some conservatives seem to see it. This is what happens to conservatism when you strip it of moralism – it becomes economically deterministic, heartless in some quarters, libertine in most. It is the law of the jungle, in that it barely has any laws at all. Ironically, its end result is not a recognisably conservative society but a rather more liberal one.

Comrades, we conservatives should be no friends of pornography. It is vicarious prostitution (you pay other people to have sex on your behalf, which is just sad), its links to organised crime are well documented, it dislocates sex from its natural or romantic states, and it undoes social cohesion.

We shouldn’t outlaw porn, but we can regulate it and keep it away from kids – as we do with alcohol. That’s what Mrs T would’ve wanted, so let’s do it.