I like David Cameron a fair bit. Just as Margaret Thatcher was a pioneer of the English-speaking right in placing free markets and anti-Communism at the ideological core of 20th century conservatism, I feel Britain’s current Tory PM is miles ahead of his North American contemporaries in declaring a well-adjusted civil society to be the primary goal of conservatism in the 21st.
Cameronism, it seems (at least from my distant perspective) is a conservative vision that prioritizes the broad good of maintaining decency, respect, and order in day-to-day life over some of the right’s more dated, disparate causes of the past. The PM’s high-profile break with 20th century conservative orthodoxy on gay marriage is a good example: rather than view the cry for same-gender nuptials as an isolated act of liberal aggression against a “historic institution,” Cameron’s new, bigger-picture conservatism saw an opportunity to bring more couples into the bourgeois institution itself, and emphasize wedded monogamy as the expected cornerstone of all families, gay or straight.
That was a relatively uncontroversial proposal, at least in the sense gay marriage wasn’t a terribly novel idea (regardless of how novel his justification) by the time Cameron’s government legalized it. The same can’t be said of his latest so-called “Big Society” initiative — cracking down on Internet porn.
On Monday, Cameron delivered a long speech outlining an ambitious anti-pornography agenda, and despite the simplistic caricatures that invariably followed, his analysis was informed, cautious, and thoughtful.
Obviously “the internet has transformed our lives for the better,” he said in a long opening concession, but we also can’t deny its responsibility for two of the darkest ills of the modern era: the proliferation of child porn and the proliferation of children who look at porn.
Towards such evils we can afford no ambiguity, he continued. A government that turns a blind eye to the former is one that aides and abets the vicious sexual exploitation of minors — those famous ‘most vulnerables’ the state supposedly has its firmest mandate to protect — while political indifference to the latter risks mainstreaming a truly destructive childhood “rite of passage.” In the long-term, neither online norm is compatible with a society that values the health and welfare of its citizens, nor one that opposes their exploitation and dysfunction.
Cameron’s solutions? Pragmatism and common-sense.
On the child porn front, much of the British government’s crackdown will be criminal, with increased policing of the so-called “hidden internet” where pedophiles thrive. But in the meantime, the Cameron administration will also demand Google and friends stop providing results for searches “where there could be no doubt whatsoever about the sick and malevolent intent of the searcher,” while simultaneously instituting greater checks and balances to ensure ambiguous queries don’t yield objectionable results. Searches for “child sex,” for example, should err on the side of providing matches for “child gender,” suggested the PM.
To prevent children from consuming too much porn themselves, meanwhile, Cameron’s preference was for mandatory “family friendly” website blockers to be installed on every UK computer; blockers that would filter out all pornographic websites and could only be deactivated by one of the household’s legal adults calling up the ISP.
“By the end of this year,” promised the Prime Minister, “when someone sets up a new broadband account, the settings to install family friendly filters will be automatically selected; if you just click next or enter, then the filters are automatically on.” And if you already have a connection? Cameron says you’ll soon be getting a mandatory call from your provider asking you to make an “unavoidable decision” about whether to opt-in to the filter regime or not.
The backlash to all this has been predictable. As Cameron himself noted, one of the great frustrations of internet regulation is this entrenched idea — particularly ubiquitous among the young — “that you can as easily legislate what happens on the internet as you can legislate the tides,” and therefore even attempting to do so is “somehow naïve or backwards looking.” Then there’s the similarly entrenched view that any efforts to curtail the public’s private consumption of pornography — even when children are the consumers, or child porn is what’s being consumed — are little more than the fussy, judgemental crusades of puritanical busybodies, completely divorced from any legitimate concern of health or safety.
But what’s on the other hand?
It’s hard to deny the massive proliferation of internet pornography is retarding the normal sexual development of modern youth. If you have access to an impossibly large library of titillating photographs and videos from your earliest adolescence, it’s inevitable such things will provide the bulk of your education on this deeply private topic. And the younger you begin browsing such libraries, the earlier this amazingly robust “education” will come to numb and bore you, fostering the development of ever-wilder sexual tastes and fetishes in response.
Researchers like yourbrainonporn.com‘s Gary Wilson (best known for a particularly infamous TED Talk) have suggested modern youth’s impossibly high, porno-inspired standards for sexual arousal have indeed warped youth sexuality in a variety of ways — erectile dysfunction in men, unachievable performance standards for women. The end result is a generation robbed of the natural, imperfect cycle of real-world, human-centric sexual observation and exploration that has traditionally accompanied maturation.
Child porn, likewise, has been the subject of increasing “freedom of taste” debate as of late, particularly in Canada, where a few high-profile, libertarian-minded individuals such as Prime Minister Harper’s former chief advisor and Mrs. Conrad Black have mused skeptically on the the need for government to ban the “private contemplation of squalid pictures.” But again, the evidence suggests otherwise.
A powerful feature published earlier this year in New York Magazine reveals in stark detail just how permanent and omnipresent the trauma of sexual exploitation can be to former subjects of kiddie porn, in large part because of the victims’ inescapable, oppressive knowledge that their naked bodies now float permanently on the net, circulating before — the numbers suggest — an exponentially growing number of eyeballs. And as is the case with “normal porn,” that growing appetite begets spoiled demand, which begets increased pressure for someone, somewhere, to harm ever-more children (in ever-more deranged ways) to satiate the subculture’s gluttonous libido.
Cameron’s battle to uproot such deeply entrenched cultural vices will be decidedly uphill — technologically, if nothing else. But what makes such leadership encouraging and inspirational just the same is his willingness not to simply accept these gross excesses of the internet age as irreversible facts of life, but rather perfectly ordinarily social problems that can, in fact, be solved with the right sort of innovative thinking. Just like any other.
It’s an attitude that reflects a new sort of conservatism; a philosophy not content with merely returning to the easy fights of yesteryear to win the same old cliched victories (fresh tax cut anybody?), but rather one that reflects honestly on the unique social challenges of the 21st century and seeks solutions that can respect the modern while still upholding the traditional.
It’s a lead conservatives in North America would be wise to follow. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Britain had the right answer before us, so to speak.