CHRISTIANITY, COPYRIGHT & CENSORSHIP  (page 2)

  ENGLISH HERITAGE

Evolution of English culture is generally recognized to have been different than that in continental Europe for at least four reasons.  First, the old Roman law never took hold in England.  Instead, a distinct legal system based on precedent - the Common Law evolved.  Second, England was a multicultural society with Norman, Dane, Saxon and Celt all claiming pride of place and heritage.

Third, the Protestant Reformation took a distinctly English flavor when the Church of Rome was replaced by a catholic yet protestant Church of England.  To a degree, this left the Reformation unresolved in England awaiting denouement in a two act drama consisting of the English Civil War of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 including the Declaration of Rights in 1689.

Finally, the flip side of censorship as prohibition is censorship as propaganda encouraging politically or religiously correct art.  National historiography, the origins of nations, differ between the nations states that coalesced into modern Europe out of Germanic occupation of the Western Empire.  In France, it was the Chanson de Roland concerning the glories of Charlemagne's champion.  In England, it was the Arthurian legend and the Holy Grail:

In the history of myths of national origins few have been as influential and have had such a curious development as those popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain.  His writings, appearing about 1138... had a marked influence in subduing the social animosities of the Bretons, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans and drawing them together into a single nation.  Geoffrey's fanciful account was used by early Plantagenet monarchs to support their regal claims and for both Tudors and Stuarts it came to constitute a useful prop to their dynastic ones. Though confidence in its historical reliability had almost evaporated by the eighteenth century, as the chief source of the Arthurian legend its influence carried on ... as a spur to Celtic imagination... into our own day. (MacDougall 1982: 7)

The power of this myth - including the images and works of art it inspired - can be seen in the schism between the Churches of Rome and of England over Henry Vill's divorce.  In his argument with the Pope, Henry VIII drew on the Arthurian legend to prove the independence of the English Crown and Church.  The argument went like this:

• Britain was named after Brutus, grandson of Aeneas of Troy, son of Venus and legendary funder of Rome.  Britain, therefore, had as noble a claim to the Imperium as Rome; and,

• Joseph of Arimathea took the cup from the Last Supper with some of Christ's crucification blood and fled to Britain where, in 63 C.E., he founded a church in Glastonbury.  This sanctioned the claim of an English Church founded in Apostolic times (MacDougall 1982: 14).  It is from this argument that the Grail legend, originally a Celtic myth about a cauldron of immortality (Layard 1975; Squire 1975) gained quasi-Christian status, and in the guise of Perceval received even Wagnerian recognition.

With Elizabeth I, this legend was played out as the Fairy Queene. It was Her Court, not that of Louis XIV a century later, that revolutionized the nature of consumption and began a consumer boom that still influences our modern sense of style and fashion (McCraken 1988).  To keep Catholic and other nobles loyal, in very troubled times, Good Queen Bess exploited the hegemonic power of things and used the court to communicate the legitimacy of Her Rule. 

Before her time, the family was the traditional unit of consumption. One bought for future generations.  One bought that which would last because it took five generations of patina to move one's family into the "gentle" class.  She, however, forced the ambitious to rise above their station by spending now, for themselves -- to be the prettiest peacock at court, the most generous.  Members of the court were compelled to consume their way to honor, power and gentility.  This shift from long- to short-term consumption had a dramatic impact on the evolution of Western culture contributing to the breakdown of feudal society.  At the same time, in England and other European countries, punitive feudal 'sumptuary' legislation remained in place for two more centuries to restrict "status fraud", i.e. persons of the lower classes dressing or otherwise pretending to be of a higher station in society.

With establishment of a new Church, the Bible-building process continued in England coming to fruition under Elizabeth's successor, James I.  This resulted in a literary work that William Blake, and later Northrop Frye, called "The Great Code of Art" (Frye 1982: xvi).  Like newly Protestant countries on the continent, England now had a second Vulgate - a Bible readable by the public - in the national language, its meaning not kept secret in the Latin of Rome.  And despite more than 300 years of the scientific enlightenment, many contemporary English-speaking Christians still believe the King James' version of the Bible to be the literal Word of God.   But has the written word become a graven image?

Submission to the new church and new bible was used to separate Roman Catholic and Protestant from the ruling class, i.e. members of the Church of England with the monarch as Vicar of Christ and Defender of the Faith - the Investiture Controversy revisited.  As well, the myth of the divine right of kings was used to maintain prerogatives of the Crown.  Parliament needed an argument to prove its supremacy relative to the successor's of the Tudor dynasty - the Stuart Kings.  They found it in another great English myth which was then politically nurtured and in whose service art served as hand maiden the Anglo-Saxon Myth.  The argument went something like this:

• among the ancient Anglo-Saxons, the chief was chosen by members of the tribe based on throneworthiness, i.e. the candidate who could provide the most loot, pillage, plunder and rape;

• ancient Anglo-Saxon kings were thus invested with authority by the people; and,

• therefore, according to ancient custom and tradition, Parliament is supreme.

The clash of these two myths - the Holy Grail and Throneworthiness - lead to the English Civil War of the 1640s.  But is was not just about politics. It was also about religion - about a catholic or protestant future.  With respect to the arts, the tone of Protestant debate was somewhat different from what Martin Luther said of music:

the art of prophets, the only art that can calm the agitations of the soul, ...one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us. [Prochnow 1964: 189] 

To the English Protestants, especially the 'Puritans', art was not a frill; it was an evil inspired by the Devil to tempt sinners from the serious work of God.  And Anglican Royalists and Roman Catholics were, of course, the most blatant sinners.  To a degree, Mayflower Puritans fled England in the 1620s to escape art as well as the Royalists and Roman Catholics who worshipped graven images.  Thus, the beginning of the national historiography of the United States of America is anti-art .

With the execution of Charles I in 1649, Cromwell and the Puritans excised art and music, laughter and gaiety during the Commonwealth, a pseudo-republican form of government replacing the monarchy until 1660.  Black and white was all that God would tolerate in His Commonwealth - this land England.

But with restoration of Charles II, art took revenge with a hedonism and pleasure-seeking unparalleled in the history of English art - the Restoration plays are examples.  The scar left by the power of art, first controlled and then unleashed, helps explain English ambivalence towards art.  Furthermore, until the American and French Revolutions of the late 18th century, England was the only country in which the Commons controlled public spending.  And the Commons were simply unwilling to support 'aristocratic indulgences' such as art.

The only exception was art lotteries.  The first collections of the British Museum were funded through a lottery approved by Parliament in 1753 (Chartrand, Ruston 1981).  Modern use of lotteries to support art, beginning in the 1970s, is not therefore without precedent in English cultural history.

In fact, between the 1640s and the Second World War, the national arts policy in all English countries, including the United States, was no support.  At the end of World War II, the English world faced clear evidence of the power of art in the hands of Hitler and Stalin.  This led to modification of the traditional policy by creating a unique English compromise: the arm's length arts council - funded by, but independent of, the State (Chartrand, McCaughey 1989).

The United States exercised this compromise in two ways.  First, in response to cultural penetration of Latin America by the Nazi propaganda machine, the United States Information Agency was created during World War II to propagate American culture abroad, but not at home.  Second, in 1965 the NEA was created.  Nonetheless, public funding of art, even at arm's length from political influence, is a very fragile flower with unique and recent English cultural roots.

The Anglo-Saxon myth was used again 50 years after the death of Charles I to overthrow of his son's successor, James II, accused of being a Roman Catholic.  In 1689, he was replaced on the throne by William of Orange who claimed Anglo-Saxon roots, adherence to the Protestant faith, support of the Church of England and, most importantly, the supremacy of Parliament.  This period - 1689 to 1690 - is known as the Glorious Revolution.  It was William's wife, Queen Anne, in whose name the first copyright act was passed - the Statute of Queen Anne in 1709.  Both apologists and critics spewed forth art in every medium of expression. In prose, Jonathon Swift and Daniel Defoe were critics:

In his satire, Jure Divino, he [Defoe] characterized the Saxon kingdoms (as all kingdoms) as being built, not on freedom, but "on Violence and Blood."  The right to property, so cherished by the middle class, took its origins not from any natural right (contra Locke), but from violence (MacDougal 1982: 76).

But ongoing tension between Catholic, Church of England and Protestant fundamentalism had other results:.

The men responsible for technological innovations . . . during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution were non-conformists who had been excluded from the universities and learned their science indirectly while pursuing their trade. (Senate Special Committee, 1970, p. 21)

Paralleling the Industrial Revolution, there was a consumer revolution in 18th century England in which Josiah Wedgewood played a major role.  He shifted the source of fashion from the nobility to the bourgeois marketeer, or "market ethnographers" who watched for patterns and regularities and adjusted products and marketing strategies to take advantage of emerging opportunities.  By the 19th century such independent observers had attained unprecedented social mobility.  Thus McCraken notes: "In the person of Beau Brummel we see nothing less than the abrogation of powers of influence that had previously been possessed only by the monarch" (McCraken 1988: 25) - the beginnings of the star system?

But then a new intellectual force captured the imagination of England - economics, a new secular religion of progress.  Economics, as a discipline of thought or "a recognized field of tooled knowledge" (Schumpeter 1949: 143) emerged in the late 18th century at about the same time as political rights of the individual became a reality with the American and then the French Revolutions.  Adam Smith, writing as the flood tide of revolution began to inundate the old order of privilege and preference, demonstrated a strong awareness of the cultural matrix of economic phenomena (Smith 1776).  One of his successors, however, stripped economics of all cultural context -and trivialized art.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a lawyer turned reformer.  He believed in "La Raison" (Schumpeter 1949: 115) as the ultimate test of value to society.  To Bentham, neither God nor some "natural harmony" was at work in human affairs.  He assumed that all the pleasures and pains of an individual resulted from simple physical sensation and could be measured and added into a quantity called 'happiness'.  Assuming the happiness of each individual was weighted equally, they could be added up to the common good or welfare of society.  The test of public policy became the greatest good for the greatest number.  Thus the social good was nothing more nor less than the sum of individual sensations of pleasure or pain -- the only ultimate realities (Schumpeter 1949; 131) -- the two sovereign masters of humanity (Clough 1964; 825).

The assumption that pleasure and pain could be measured became reified as money.  Lack of money was the source of misery. Enough money was the source of happiness.  This led to equating value to society -- of an object, product, process or person -- with its dollar price in the marketplace.  This assumption fostered development of an illusory calculus which became the centerpiece for the economic theory of consumer behaviour -- the marginal utility theory of value (Blaug 1968; 304).

In the Benthamite tradition, however, maximizing pleasure was restrained by the tenets of Ethical Hedonism, a very protestant ethic.  This ethic, beyond the moral value of legislation which made "status forgeries illegal " (McCracken 1988; 33).  But when the protestant ethic collapsed, only hedonism remained -- in all its unrestrained, irrational incarnations.  Without a generally accepted moral code, the law became the institution empowered to moderate individual pleasure-seeking following the principles of crime and punishment proposed by Bentham (Becker 1968).

To Bentham culture, custom and tradition as well as art were irrelevant because they were irrational and interfered with pure reason (Bell 1976: 224).  And because men are not just equal but nondescript and malleable (Schumpeter 1954: 132-4), therefore tastes would become so through another Benthamite policy -- compulsory education.  Even aesthetics were affected, shrinking to analysis of the pleasurable sensations evoked by a work of art.  In this aesthetic, a thing is beautiful because it pleases, it does not please because it is 'objectively' beautiful (Schumpeter 1954: 1267).  This aesthetic, combined with Benthamite functional utility, meant that beauty of form was rejected as "irrational".  This reached logical conclusion in the aphorism: form follows function.

Following Bentham, each generation of economists struggled for release from utilitarian inhibition (Chartrand 1990).  Alfred Lord Marshall accepted the economic importance of the arts, but retained moral doubts:

Education in art stands on a somewhat different footing from education in hard thinking: for while the latter nearly always strengthens the character, the former not infrequently fails to do this. Nevertheless the development of the artistic faculties of the people is in itself an aim of the very highest importance, and is becoming a chief factor of industrial efficiency... Increasingly wealth is enabling people to buy things of all kinds to suit the fancy, with but a secondary regard to their powers of wearing; so that in all kinds of clothing and furniture it is every day more true that it is the pattern which sells the things. Increasingly wealth is enabling people to buy things of all kinds to suit the fancy, with but a secondary regard to their powers of wearing; so that in all kinds of clothing and furniture it is every day more true that it is the pattern which sells the things. (Marshall 1920: 177-8).

Even Keynes thought he had finally thrown off the restrictive restrictive Protestant hedonism and escaped the Benthamite tradition (Innis 1951: 79-80):

I do now regard that [the Benthamite tradition] as the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilization and is responsible for its present moral decay.  We used to regard the Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the representatives of tradition, convention and hocus-pocus.  In truth, it was the Benthamite calculus, based on an over-valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the quality of the popular Ideal.  Moreover, it was this escape from Bentham ... which has served to protect the whole lot of us from the final reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism known as Marxism (Keynes 1949: 96-7).

In spite of Keynes' hope, his personal involvement with the Bloomsbury Group and his founding role in creating the Arts Council of Great Britain (Keynes 1975), the impact of Bentham continues.  It limits what phenomena are considered legitimate subjects of economic investigation.  It continues to blind mainstream economists to the cultural context of economic behaviour.

COPYRIGHT & CENSORSHIP

Henry VIII not only founded a new Church, he and his Tudor dynasty also set the seal on the status of the artist in English-speaking culture - a status founded on suspicion and limitation of artists' rights.  This process began in response to the first engine of industrial mass production, not the steam engine, but the printing press innovated in the 15th century.  In the religious wars and climate of intolerance characterizing the Reformation, the free dissemination of knowledge by this engine was viewed, from the start, as a threat to established order.

With introduction of the printing press in England, the Tudor monarchs began to grant to approved printers the right to copy approved works, i.e. copyright.  Thus, the roots of copyright are censorship and feudal grants of commercial privilege (MacDonald 1971).  In fact, when the first formal copyright law was passed, the Statute of Queen Anne in 1709, the owner of copyright was almost always the book seller and it was book sellers who lobbied for the law (Chafee 1984: 722).

Subsequent development led to at least philosophic recognition in the English-speaking world of the unique rights of a creator:

... intellectual property is, after all, the only absolute possession in the world... The man who brings out of nothingness some child of his thought has rights therein which cannot belong to any other sort of property. [Chafee 1984: 506-507).

But such moral rights of the creator are in fact not the historical root of copyright and are not reflected in English legal tradition.  The residual of feudal and crown law did not vanish with the advent of democracy, even in the United States.  On the contrary, it survives in attenuated form to plague democratic law and government and oppress the artist.  Obsolete in practice, they still influence the spirit of the law (Gray 1981).

Today, copyright and other forms of intellectual property legislation are justified in English-speaking cultures as a protection of, and incentive to, human creativity which otherwise could be used freely by others.  In return, the society expects creators to make their work available and that a market will be created in which such work can be bought and sold.  But while society wishes to encourage creativity, it does not want to foster harmful market power.  Accordingly, the state builds in limitations to the rights granted to the creator.  Such limitations embrace both time and space.  Rights are granted for a fixed period of time, and protect only the fixation of human creativity in material form (Chartrand 1987).  Intellectual property rights thus provide the legal foundation for the industrial organization of art and science (Commons 1957).

An example illustrates the economic role of copyright. Consider a literary work which becomes a play through the licence of its copyright.  In turn, the play becomes a film which, in turn, is spun-off into posters, toys and a soundtrack. Both the film and soundtrack are broadcast on radio and television.  Eventually a book is made concerning the making of the movie, and a sequel of the movie is then produced - all based on the playwrights' original copyright.  Even museums and archives are related to copyright in that most artifacts and documents, contained are within the public domain, i.e. copyright has lapsed through time.

But legal systems are the product of specific cultures. For example, in French-speaking and most Western European countries, droits d'auteur or author's rights are the core of what in English-speaking countries is called copyright. Such rights are rooted in the Republican Revolution of the late 18th century, and the Rights of Man Movement .