Banned Books
Won’t someone think of the children?
People are banning books again. You can feel the desire to build bonfires coming off them in waves. This happens every few years in the United States. It’s an old and dangerous tradition beloved by authoritarians. One of the first book burnings takes place in the Bible.
In schools, parents are taking it upon themselves to “protect” children from what they deem as dangerous ideas about things like race, gender, and sexuality. Sex is an old favorite for people building these specious arguments. Anything with women’s bodies, or bodies of any kind really, is suspect in their eyes, and nudity is often used as an excuse to drop the ban hammer. These self-appointed crusaders feel entitled to do this because they believe in free speech, but not for everyone. Bans disproportionately target writers who celebrate inclusivity. Writers who are Black or people of color, writers who are disabled, writers who are LGBT+—their work is frequently targeted by censors.
According to the American Library Association, there were 273 censorship attempts against books in 2020; there have been 230 from September, 2021 until the writing of this sentence. This has happened in lots of places, including Wichita, Kansas, and Keller, Texas, a suburb near Dallas–Fort Worth, but the specifics of each incident follow a worn-out pattern repeating itself across the country. The latest case making headlines is the banning of the acclaimed graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman in Tennessee.
Book bans remind me of home. I live in the Heartland, in the suburbs—exactly the kind of place you’d expect people to be striking out against Critical Race Theory and novels featuring trans characters. But it’s not that simple. I grew up on the prairie, in a former coal-mining town where the per capita income was about the same number as the population. People were kind but poor. In this place, a small-town Lost World, the kind you’d see on an old black-and-white TV, one of my lifelines as a kid was the public library built by Andrew Carnegie in 1910. It had a limestone façade; inside it I read books on sex and culture and world travel and intellectual discourses far removed from my surroundings. Adults who shared my values encouraged me. My mom was the school librarian.
Depending on your perspective, it’s funny to see frumpy middle-aged white people scream-crying in school-board meetings because their kid had to read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, but it’s also terrifying. Laughter’s a good corrective. But I grew up with people like that and I know what they’re feeling. Dismissing them makes me uneasy. Underneath their rage is a boiling fear. Below that: pain. Letting go of the rage means facing the fear and pain. Most people, in my experience, would rather die.
Let’s step back for a moment: Writing is speech. Speech supports by its practice, all other freedoms. If you can’t say it or write it, only thought remains. Thoughts influence you; speech influences entire communities. That’s one reason free speech comes under attack from authoritarians and totalitarians as surely as the sun rises—in this case the Black Sun (Sonnenrad) that decorated Heinrich Himmler’s castle at Wewelsburg.
Literature’s story is also the history of those who practiced free speech and those who attempted to suppress it. Burning or banning books is a cornerstone of anti-free speech movements. In the Occidental tradition, that starts with Acts 19:19, wherein Paul encourages the Ephesians to burn manuscripts worth about $3,227,538 in today’s currency. Like other ancient book burnings, it’s hard to know how true the story is, and the same is true of a second example: the infamous 212 B.C.E. murder of Confucian scholars and burning of texts allegedly carried out by Emperor Qin Shi Huang in China.
We know more about later attempts to suppress free speech in literature. We also know how people have stood against it. Take John Milton’s impassioned Aeropagitica, a speech he gave against Calvinist censors in England’s parliament, probably the greatest free-speech polemic ever delivered in any age. We know how Josef Stalin treated Mikhail Bulgakov, and how that led to the suppression of one of the greatest works in the history of Russian literature, The Master and Margarita, which was circulated as samizdat under the Soviet regime until its uncensored publication in 1969. We see Graham Greene defending Vladimir Nabokov; we read about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and his The Satanic Verses. We know Toni Morrison and Harper Lee end up on the “Most Challenged Books” list put out by the ALA almost every year. You can explore these debates in real time if you want to. The history is there if you want to learn.
I don’t think all people crusading against books in public schools are stupid. Their actions and words are more automatic. Cliché. It’s easier to make a book disappear than to explain to your kids what kind of world we really live in; it’s easier for some people to sweep difficult truths under the rug than to face them. These people are not thinking—they’re thoughtless, in the sense that they have the intellect, and they should know better, but they’re on autopilot. They need to wake up. Hannah Arendt points out this “thoughtlessness”—and not stupidity—is the cause of cruelty (what Immanuel Kant called “a wicked heart”). This is part of the reasoning behind Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil.” Anyway. It’s not always that simple, but you get the idea.
Some people manufacture free-speech controversies to sell their hackneyed self-help rulebooks. You’ll never reach them, because they’re acting in bad faith. They’re grifters.
But what do you say to sincere people who are outmatched emotionally and intellectually by these works of literature, and who are insisting it’s their right to censor what their kids consume? Who can’t talk to their kids about sex or the Holocaust? Who are so wrapped up in their own pain, fear, and rage, that they can’t see the damage they’re doing—can’t see how silly they look, how dangerous? What do you say to those who might know better, if only you could find a way to wake them up? What do you say to someone who finds it easier to wrap themselves in a lie than to seek the truth?
