A sharp reflection on how the censorious impulse has been reframed in modern times, this piece at Quadrant shows that modern censorship is no longer just about suppressing vice or obscenity but about silencing dissent and that, furthermore, such censorship has perverse effects in our “transgressive age”:

To erect taboos, then, is nowadays to invite people, or at least those people who wish to distinguish themselves from the mass, to break them. In these circumstances, a taboo will cause the very thing that the taboo is erected to prevent…