Amid the hoo-ha, some weighty issues

All at once, the media appear to have entered an era of public outrage.

In recent months, those mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore have included: angry conservatives refusing to countenance fictive liberties in a Ronald Reagan miniseries; the multitudes now furious over Janet Jackson’s exhibitionism; and the thousands of former Times readers who don’t believe the paper should have reported on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s history of sexual harassment.

Most serious newspapers tend to regard such occasional outbursts of organized disapproval as the price of doing journalism. The soupy mix of news, entertainment and spectacle that television has become is more immediately responsive. Thus, the Reagan and Jackson controversies spurred all sorts of programming and technical changes. Even the Federal Communications Commission -- which, these days, more closely resembles a potted plant than a regulatory agency -- is investigating “indecency” on television.

So are we about to enter a new era of censorship?

No, the number of electronic entertainment outlets is too various -- in other words, too many holes in the dike of popular culture. And vulgarity, particularly when it involves sex, sells. Network executives may hate angry phone calls and e-mail, but not even the threat of eternal damnation could divert their gimlet gaze from the bottom line.

There are, moreover, a couple of ways to interpret the most quantifiable measure of public interest in last Sunday’s Super Bowl fiasco. By Wednesday, according to Lycos and Yahoo, the clip of Jackson’s momentarily bared right breast had become the most-searched-for image in the history of the Internet. Nearly 20% of all the search requests Yahoo received that day involved the singer. On Monday, Lycos recorded a staggering 60 times as many requests for the Jackson clip as it did for the next most sought-after item.

But what was that item?

It was the infamous Paris Hilton sex tape, which happens to have been on Lycos’ list of the 50 most-requested Internet items for more than three months. Now, maybe all this reflects unprecedented public revulsion, or maybe it reflects a widespread willingness to look for pictures of attractive women without their clothes on. If network executives decide the latter -- and if it turns out there are advertisers willing to pay a premium for the spot -- look for a totally topless halftime show at next year’s Super Bowl. (Should that occur, by the way, Michael Powell and his FCC will announce that federal law, the inviolability of the free market and the third law of thermodynamics preclude regulatory intervention.)

There is, however, a more subtle question about whether all this public thrashing-about may begin to engender a quiet self-censorship, a reluctance among writers, artists and producers to be identified as the sort of “controversial” personality that attracts public protest. Of course, one person’s self-censorship is another’s restraint.

Would a little of the latter really be such a bad thing, and how might we tell the difference?

The critical distinction is between standards and self-censorship: Standards are the rules one chooses for oneself. Without them, life and art are a chaotic cesspool. Self-censorship is the anticipatory acquiescence to the imagined objections of others. It’s the ethical equivalent of shadow boxing.

Similarly critical is the distinction between tolerance and indifference. “The law,” as the great theologian of pluralism, John Courtney Murray, once said, “must countenance many evils which morality forbids.” But it is folly to insist that expressive speech is so important that it must be legally protected without accepting the responsibility of rebutting those expressions of sentiment that are wicked, hurtful or wrong.

What’s interesting is that these deliberations, if we have the will to undertake them, occur against a social backdrop that has changed markedly in recent years.

We now live in a period of public piety unseen for generations. Expressions of squishy religiosity -- as opposed to genuine religion -- are all around us. Consider that in 1960, John F. Kennedy practically had to swear never to think a Catholic thought in the Oval Office in order to demonstrate his fitness for the presidency. In 2004, Howard Dean practically had to promise to discuss his “relationship with God” to get on the primary ballot.

From license plate holders to talk shows to presidential addresses, the symbols of piety are everywhere. Even outside the mainstream churches and vast archipelago of evangelical enthusiasm, it’s impossible not to run into people who

describe themselves as “spiritual.”

These spiritual folks -- transcendental tourists who pick up metaphysical baubles from every creed in sight -- are what a consumer society throws up instead of traditional believers. These are people who want the consolation of faith without its ethical obligations. Whether they or their more conventionally churched fellow citizens really will have much of an impact on the public morality is a debatable question. There is little doubt, though, that they’re already altering the public discourse.

So, too, is the right’s adoption -- as in the controversy over the Reagan docudrama -- of tactics first honed by the left during the culture wars. At some ill-defined moment during the various academic and literary skirmishes over sensitivity and politically correct speech, a tipping point was reached. At that instant we passed from a society in which people said, “I find what you’ve said offensive and I disagree completely,” to one in which we simply insist, “You can’t say that.”

The distinction between those two responses is too clear to belabor.

Finally, there’s the demographic reality that, as the baby boomers age, we become a society progressively more concerned with issues of security, propriety and rediscovered social convention. The soft-focus libertarianism that prevails among most boomers is somewhat at war with these tendencies, but it isn’t at all clear which will win out in the end.

In the meantime, we remain -- in essayist William Pfaff’s memorable phrase -- “condemned to freedom.”