Censorship vs. The Canterbury Tales
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939)
Austrian psychoanalyst.
A question is asked: “Should Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales be censored?” The question is answered—as another question: “Should the Bible—classical literature—or any literature, for that matter—be censored?”
You will never find a piece of literature, of any importance to read, which is unanimously uncontroversial. You could travel far and wide, from the heart of largest metropolis to the hoof-beaten trails of the ancient Mayan ruins; you could spend your entire life seeking out a book which had not even the slightest shred ideas or themes that were completely uncontroversial, but you would never find it. Life is controversial, and thus literature is likewise.
Why should we censor The Canterbury Tales? Is it because it promotes pornography, and amoral values? The Canterbury Tales is a piece of classic European literature; it is a tale like so many others written during the renaissance. And if one feels so strongly against this piece of literature the solution is plain—don’t read it. Men and woman, liberals and conservative, Christians and Atheists, Republicans and Democrats—and every thing in-between look to the government to provide them with a clean, orthodox version or a politically correct version—this, my friends, is censorship. It is not the government’s job to be your mother; when you do this you begin to create, what Thomas Hobbes described as—a leviathan:
The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another...is, to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will...This is the generation of that great Leviathan, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortal God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence.
Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679)
English philosopher and political thinker.
Leviathan
Do not give the government the power to censor; do not allow them to become a leviathan, it is the individual’s right and responsibility to censor what they do and do not read. The Canterbury Tales is a piece of Middle English literature, and though it may have some controversial material in it—though what doesn’t—it shouldn’t be censored for all. If you don’t want to read it—don’t read it. So as the British politician, David McAdam Eccles said, “The only censor is the audience, which will decide whether it wants it and how soon it gets fed up with it.”
