Books Not Bombs, Bridges Not Walls

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution grants rights to freedom of speech, and is one of the greatest contributions that the United States’ Constitution can make to book lovers everywhere. Banned authors all over the world have looked at American ideals of freedom with awe and respect as they struggle for their rights to express their own thoughts even at the risk of their lives. Hence, American libraries and other progressive organizations have a great tradition of fighting censorship and book banning whenever it arises. Organizations such as American Library Association (ALA), the American Civil Liberties Union, National Coalition Against Censorship, People for the American Way, and the PEN American Center exist to defend the First Amendment, through legal action as well as by raising public awareness.  

As the American President John F. Kennedy said: “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”   

But even in the United States, preserving the freedom to think, write and read, is not without its continued struggles and challenges. Some of the major reasons behind attempts to ban and censor books even in the US may include sex, age inappropriateness, violence, suicide, unconventional political and religious views, offensive language, drug and alcohol use, and LGBTQIA+etc.  Hence, to celebrate the freedom to read, the ALA annually holds Banned Books Week (September 22-28, 2019) to highlight current and historical attempts to ban books in libraries and schools. 

My own thoughts on banning and censorship, after having worked in the library profession for more than 20 years, are that among all the significant relationships humans have, the most important is the one they have (often unbeknownst) with specific ideas of what is "true," "good" and "beautiful," and hence often worth living and dying for. Specific ideas about the true, the good and the beautiful, (often chosen by the parents, schools, and/or group in political/cultural power) have consequences when they repeatedly circulate (without free pro and con debate and discussion), in the culture. In a sense, if the ideas in repeated circulation and subject to frequent reinforcements are tribal, narcissistic, popular, provincial, there will indeed be more tribalism, narcissism, populism, and provincialism, in self and culture, as the history of our species depicts. 

As substantive ideas about the true, the good, and the beautiful often have specific "depth" and "breadth" "character" and often “development”--egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, or pre-conventional, conventional, or post-conventional etc.,--and when that privileged specificity circulates, in the culture, it usually imparts corresponding depth and breadth, character and development, to thoughts, feelings, motives and attitudes. Perhaps the disproportionate, exaggerated, intense familiarity often becomes the whole truth, goodness and beauty, for most members of that particular tribe, which comes in handy in times of economic and political conflict, largely "cashed" by the ruling elites on opposing sides. 

In other words, a tribal or mythic or provincial or nationalistic mindset in human children is engineered by repeated familiarizations (and reinforcements in the absence of opposing or creative or critical or diverse viewpoints) to selected tribal meaning systems and nationalistic narratives (in-formation-in-circulation), be it East or West.  Hence, in any given culture, the considerations of power, meaning systems in circulation, and individual and collective identities, are among some of the major factors underlying the phenomena of banned or celebrated books. Thus, reading the banned books can help in understanding the intrinsic nature and value of ideas themselves and their complex interactions (inclusion and exclusion, repetition and reinforcement) with processes of human conscious, unconscious, culture and power, as they co-create varieties of individual and collective identities, and choices. Only after a critical and creative discourse about relation of ideas to each other, and their relation to universal human ideals of truth and goodness, freedom and justice, can human beings aspire to live a productive and examined life. As Alfred Whitney Griswold said: “The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom.” Books not bombs. Bridges not walls.

Here are a few titles discussing the impact of censorship on our politics, society, and culture. 

Censored: a literary history of subversion and control by Matthew Fellion

Censored 2019: fighting the fake news invasion: the top censored stories and media analysis of 2017-18 -- Project Censored's  most recent edition of a collection of essays highlighting news stories suppressed or ignored by the "free press". 

Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman -- A recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Kahneman helps make sense of human literary and aesthetic response, and the psychology, sociology and politics of censorship.