G.G.: I should have thought there'd be general agreement on that. But as I said, there would be an aesthetic/moral overlap at this point. The man who painted the first house may have done so purely from an aesthetic preference, and it would, to use an old-fashioned word, be "sinful" if I were to take him to account in respect of his taste. Such an accounting would conceivably inhibit all subsequent judgments on his part. But if I were able to persuade him that his particular aesthetic indulgence represented a moral danger to the community as a whole, and providing I could muster a vocabulary appropriate to the task – which would not be, obviously, a vocabulary of aesthetic standards – then that would, I think, be my responsibility.
g.g.: You do realize, of course, that you're beginning to talk like a character out of Orwell?
G.G.: Oh, the Orwellian world holds no particular terrors for me.
g.g.: And you also realize that you're defining and defending a type of censorship that contradicts the whole post-Renaissance tradition of Western thought?
G.G.: Certainly. It's the post-renaissance tradition that has brought the Western world to the brink of destruction. You know, this odd attachment to freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and so on is a peculiarly Occidental phenomenon. It's all part of the Occidental notion that one can successfully separate word and deed.
g.g.: The sticks-and-stones syndrome, you mean?
G.G.: Precisely. There's some evidence for the fact that – well, as a matter of fact, McLuhan talks about just that in the Gutenberg Galaxy – that preliterate peoples or minimally literate peoples are much less willing to permit that distinction.