We human beings, especially those of us who are getting on in years, are always complaining that "anything goes these days." It's a habit that defines the species. Elderly Neanderthals probably tottered about fretting that the cave was going to the dogs and it was time for tighter standards and firmer discipline -- to be enforced by themselves, naturally.

Nothing much has changed. In the West, at least, the conviction still prevails that standards have never been more free -- or lax, depending on your point of view. Young people, that exasperating band of conformist freethinkers, read, write, listen to and do whatever they want, don't they? Yet despite this, or because of it, censorship is as much in the air as ever. Every other day, discussion flares up anew about the permissible limits in this or that arena: the Internet, art exhibitions, film ratings, libraries and school reading lists, to name a few.

About the only exempt field in the developed world is politics, probably because its practitioners would not recognize a subversive thought if they fell over it. But there's a lesson in this, which it might profit the culture-censors to contemplate. Maybe politicians only become subversive when subversion is not permitted. Maybe the most reliable censorship of all is the self-censorship (a combination of satisfaction, laziness and want of provocation) that follows on being allowed to think, read and say whatever one wants, short of slander. As in politics, so in art. How many people would have bothered to read "Lady Chatterley's Lover," 70 years ago, had it not been for the incomparable promotion skills of the British and U.S. censors?