Culture, citizenship and censorship

Public mores are a laudable thing. Yet to say that they are useful and good is to say nothing about their content. The Greek philosopher Socrates once suggested that the traditional culture of his city be banned and replaced by a culture that was more thoughtful. By doing so, Socrates earned the scorn of his fellow citizens, who equated their conventions with the good, without giving thought to the fact that unexamined conventions are often not worth having.

The notion of a culture of thoughtful examination is alien to tyrannies because such regimes presume the infinite wisdom of their tyrants. Free, democratically governed republics, on the other hand, governed as they are by laws, rely on the consideration of their citizens to craft laws that are democratic in spirit. People who fear this culture of consideration and yearn for a regime where such trifles do not exist are people whose public mores are corrupt and slavish.

It is just such slavish corruption masquerading as public morality that we see at work in Poland, where Christian theater is condemned by politicians as heresy, where alternative theater is prosecuted as pornographic and where the young director Jan Klata is ostracized from the largest metropolitan centers on account of his plays being thoughtful, and therefore provocative.

The current pioneers of Polish culture are using their freedom to attempt to craft a public morality that is thoughtful, not slavish, honest, not corrupt, and therefore deserving of public support in a democratic republic precisely because without such a culture, the education of a self-governing citizenry becomes impossible.

Peter S Rieth, Zbigniew Raszewski Theatrical Institute