Book banning

[Belacqua]

I wanted to open a thread about book banning in the US.  This came to my attention because the California education system decided to pull several classics from their curriculum of required reading.  They assert this is not a ban but rather a pause on these books as they investigate complaints they've received from families who's children attend public schools.  But this isn't remotely the first time this sort of thing has come up.  Among these books is To Kill a Mockingbird.  This is one of my all time favorite books and movies as well.  I've defended it in arguments as a true classic and work of art, but after reading a few articles about the book from the perspective of being black in America and educating students about racism, I now understand why there's good reason to pull this book and replace it with more appropriate books.  Understand, I never, ever advocate banning any work of art, but I do see why there are just better books out there if your purpose is to confront the issue of racism in America.  Although I'll never stop loving this book, I now agree that it's time to defer to something better for this purpose.  If the point is just to introduce students to fine, classic literature, then it still should be considered quite valid.

The more I think about it, the more this sort-of-ban in California seems sort of quaint. In fact it ends up being a backhanded compliment to literature, of a type that hardly exists any more.

I say it's quaint because it addresses books from an earlier generation, and takes an approach which isn't really even necessary any more. Our culture has much more effective ways of making good literature obscure and unread. But it's a compliment to literature because it assumes that these four or five old books might actually have the power to influence young minds. The would-be-censors think that influence would be bad, but they still have an old-fashioned notion that a serious novel might corrupt someone. 

I wouldn't be the first one to point out that the old Soviet Union's efforts to ban books were often counterproductive, and far less effective than those of the US. When the Soviets banned a book, it would often continue to circulate in samizdat. Getting your hands on a mimeo copy of a banned book is more exciting than buying something in a bookstore, and ensured a small but serious and dedicated audience. More importantly, by preventing masses of "best-seller" trash from flooding the market, the Soviets managed to perpetuate a culture of real readers. Regular people -- far more than in the US -- continued to read the classics, and to take them seriously and discuss them as important. And I think there's no doubt that among serious readers, a book like Dostoevsky's The Devils will be far more challenging to the status quo in the long run than Harper Lee's books will. It requires serious readers, though.

The American system that stops people from reading the classics is more effective because it doesn't operate so crudely. But there are a number of elements to it.

~ The notion of democracy, as misapplied to literature, questions the commitment to quality. Americans think that if you like Proust and I like Tolkien or Stephen King, then no argument can be made to show that one is better than the other. Obviously this works against quality.

~ Shiny objects are constantly dangled in our faces. Movies, TV, and video games give the viewer or player an emotional endorphin hit on schedule every few minutes. They are expertly crafted to flatter the audience. They are just far easier to like, and far more attractive to an unprepared audience, because that's what they're made to do. In contrast, a real classic text requires dedication that, to a video game player, will come to seem like work discipline. Thomas Mann doesn't reward you every three pages with a murder or a sex scene. Long long stretches of Proust are in fact boring -- because the book is about time, and the time that passes as you read the novel is a part of the meaning of the novel. But there are other benefits in reading it, which are better than a first-person shooter game, in the long run.

~ TV and other garbage appeals because it is always 99% familiar. They reassemble familiar cliches in slightly novel arrangements, just enough so that we have all the familiar pleasures with nothing new to challenge us. Classics, on the other hand, are almost always deeply strange -- doing something we've never seen before. This is why they're classics. 

~ There's an American sense of independence and cowboy mentality, which takes one's own opinions as the most important, and eliminates the humility and patience that are necessary when reading something new and difficult. We've all encountered people who think they can dismiss some huge area of philosophy or theology after reading the top two inches of a Wikipedia page. They have far too much faith in themselves. If they encounter something that seems bad to them, yet which many experts have taken seriously and valued, they are willing to dismiss it as definitely bad, and put their own uninformed opinion over that of the experts. Again, a classic will be different from what we've read before, and often will not be immediately appealing. One of the great benefits of the classics is that they enlarge our capacity for the kinds of things that we can enjoy.

~ And maybe most conclusively, and fatally, in our time the entire habitus (in Bourdieu's sense of the word) that is necessary for reading the classics is being destroyed. At the simplest and most local level, reading the classics requires a quiet room and three hours of attention span, several times a week. People who work two jobs to survive almost certainly can't manage this. You can't listen to music while you read a classic, so people who need that distraction can't manage. You can't check your phone every five minutes. Schools teach the books less and less. Teachers, if they bother with a classic, are likely to use it as a social document about feminism or racism, and not teach the literary value. In short, the habits and mental dispositions necessary to read The Divine Comedy, or The Red and the Black, or Mann's Doctor Faustus barely exist any more. 

There is no need to ban literature when the whole culture is working against it.