Unleashing the New Pleasure Principle

Surely, the value of freedom of expression cannot be confined to an unchecked liberty interest. By attempting to safeguard the single anticensorial tenet of the traditional first amendment, the modernist allows other values to be destroyed, ¹⁵¹ either by governmental indifference or by corporate design. Professor Frederick Schauer, criticizing Pool's modernist theory, doubts "whether free speech interests are necessarily strengthened by the broadening of the first amendment. We cannot ignore the extent to which an extension may be conducive to dilution."' ¹⁵² His doubts are well­founded.

Once the "new pleasure principle"' is unleashed, the cultural environment erodes all other important first­amendment values. For example, effective dissent requires a social climate in which its message can be appreciated and acted upon; worthwhile civic participation requires a citizenry that elects to do more than ingest television's soma tablets; an enlightened search for the common good requires more than atomistic desires for entertainment. Tracking Huxley's larger point, the modernist libertarian concept of first­amendment freedoms equates "the lowest passions with the highest ideals."' ¹⁵³

Finally, as Pool perceived, the increasing convergence among forms of communication creates an overlap among the technologies and uses of oral, typographic, and electronic media. Granting the point, convergence of past and present modes of expression does not dictate the extension of past forms of first­amendment protections to all present and future forms. ¹⁵⁴ Carte­blanche application of the first amendment, without accounting for the different technological attributes and special commercial uses of television, would protect past, nonelectronic forms of communication as they are corrupted by the new medium. For example, the oral discourse which was the life force of eighteenth­century revolutionary and nineteenth­century radical protests at Boston's Faneuil Hall is fundamentally altered when communicated via a staged and "soundbite"' medium. Convergence notwithstanding, one should pause before equating the two forms of discourse for first­amendment purposes.