Book banning

[Spongebob]

I want to point out that I stated a few times in this thread that the California decision is not a ban but rather a change in required reading.  However, I think both subjects, book banning and changing the required reading list, are worth discussing because this book and several others have actually been expunged from various schools in the past.  In the California case, it is refreshing to hear that they are merely reconsidering what the best material is to confront the issue of racism, yet Faux News capitalizes on this story to generate vitriol at the terrible public school system for taking a beloved book away from our children.  *Facepalm*  Why do they always do this?

[Belacqua]

Why do they always do this?

In one of his books, Zizek makes a point about violence "above the line" and violence "below the line." 

What's above the line is what we're invited to pay attention to. We are supposed to get angry about that, and to feel good about ourselves for opposing it.

What's below the line is what we generally ignore, and accept without complaint. 

In this case, a not-quite banning in California is held up in the media to get our attention, and to give us the illusion that we can fight for free speech. It distracts us from the monumental, ongoing, control of speech by the corporations, and the government policies they dictate.

[GUBU]

There is one book ban that should be enacted, ban all books that Trump cannot give a coherent and accurate summary of from his predisential library. If he's lucky, See Spot Run might just squeak in.

[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.

[The Grand Nudger]

I doubt that there's ever been a time in human history where human beings wrote more than they do now. There's always someone around to turn up their nose and pretend that their own myth of a golden age is something other than a myth - but it's deliciously ironic when a person who loves culture looks around them in this time, when more culture is being produced and turned into art of all kinds, and says, meh.

Dying of thirst in the middle of a lake. Must suck. I'd say go read a book, but, you know...they're all trash now. That's not the contention of the school board in question, obviously. They think that there are so many good books to choose from that there might be..gasp, shock, horror, a better book. One that influences young minds even more successfully, and even more productively.

[Belacqua]

I think there's another factor common in our society which works strongly against reading great literature.

This is the way we read sentences, and what we expect from them -- how we judge whether a sentence is a good sentence or not.

For the most part, it seems that modern people expect any and every sentence to be a simple unambiguous statement of truth. We want the sentence to give up its meaning to the reader with the minimum of effort on the reader's part. A sentence which admits of multiple readings, or requires effort for interpretation, will be judged a failure.

Naturally, this is true in certain contexts. We want journalism and science texts to be "transparent" in this way, so that the prose reveals clearly the truth to which it points. Nonetheless it is a misapplication of values -- and possibly scientism -- to expect other fields to work by the same standards.

Our ways of thinking about this have dumbed down. These days people have the tendency to divide sentences into either "literal" or "metaphorical" statements. As if these are the two options. In the bad old days, when people were smarter about these things, they could think more carefully. Students of the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), for example, knew that metaphor is only one of many tropes that can be used to get across a message. A metaphor is only a sentence of the structure "A is B." "La Nature est un temple" is one of the most famous of these. A lot of the non-literal statements in literature, including in the Bible, are not metaphor. In fact, when we refer to all non-literal statements as metaphor, we are using a different trope, called synecdoche.

But not all concepts are scientific concepts, and not all important truths can be expressed directly.

Take the wonderful sentence "La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur." The ambiguity that is built into this sentence is an important part of its message. It might mean that beauty is simply the promise of happiness. Or it might mean that beauty is only the promise of happiness -- but it's a promise that will never be fulfilled.

And I think that neither sentence is TRUE, in the way that a scientific sentence is true. Although the grammar is the same as "Zebras are mammals from Africa," it just isn't the same type of sentence. I think we've all come across people who are eager to fight about such sentences. If it isn't true on its face, they will declare it to be false, and its writer to be a bad writer. What they don't see is that as a concept it is something like an image -- something which we hold ambiguously in the mind -- which suggests itself at certain moments in life and enriches our understanding. It helps us to think about what is happening to us when we experience something very beautiful. It is neither provable nor unprovable, neither metaphorical nor literal. But it is a wonderful sentence which many people are grateful to have read.

So the misapplication of simple, direct reading modes to texts where they aren't applicable makes most literature inaccessible to us. And the more we read using only one technique, without the patience and humility to hold on to the ambiguity, the more classic novels are removed from our lives. Nasty school board members don't have to take action, because it's happening to us anyway.

[polymath257]

I think there's another factor common in our society which works strongly against reading great literature.

This is the way we read sentences, and what we expect from them -- how we judge whether a sentence is a good sentence or not.

For the most part, it seems that modern people expect any and every sentence to be a simple unambiguous statement of truth. We want the sentence to give up its meaning to the reader with the minimum of effort on the reader's part. A sentence which admits of multiple readings, or requires effort for interpretation, will be judged a failure.

Naturally, this is true in certain contexts. We want journalism and science texts to be "transparent" in this way, so that the prose reveals clearly the truth to which it points. Nonetheless it is a misapplication of values -- and possibly scientism -- to expect other fields to work by the same standards.

Our ways of thinking about this have dumbed down. These days people have the tendency to divide sentences into either "literal" or "metaphorical" statements. As if these are the two options. In the bad old days, when people were smarter about these things, they could think more carefully. Students of the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), for example, knew that metaphor is only one of many tropes that can be used to get across a message. A metaphor is only a sentence of the structure "A is B." "La Nature est un temple" is one of the most famous of these. A lot of the non-literal statements in literature, including in the Bible, are not metaphor. In fact, when we refer to all non-literal statements as metaphor, we are using a different trope, called synecdoche.

But not all concepts are scientific concepts, and not all important truths can be expressed directly.

Take the wonderful sentence "La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur." The ambiguity that is built into this sentence is an important part of its message. It might mean that beauty is simply the promise of happiness. Or it might mean that beauty is only the promise of happiness -- but it's a promise that will never be fulfilled.

And I think that neither sentence is TRUE, in the way that a scientific sentence is true. Although the grammar is the same as "Zebras are mammals from Africa," it just isn't the same type of sentence. I think we've all come across people who are eager to fight about such sentences. If it isn't true on its face, they will declare it to be false, and its writer to be a bad writer. What they don't see is that as a concept it is something like an image -- something which we hold ambiguously in the mind -- which suggests itself at certain moments in life and enriches our understanding. It helps us to think about what is happening to us when we experience something very beautiful. It is neither provable nor unprovable, neither metaphorical nor literal. But it is a wonderful sentence which many people are grateful to have read.

So the misapplication of simple, direct reading modes to texts where they aren't applicable makes most literature inaccessible to us. And the more we read using only one technique, without the patience and humility to hold on to the ambiguity, the more classic novels are removed from our lives. Nasty school board members don't have to take action, because it's happening to us anyway.

When I started reading history, I had a similar problem. I had been reading math and physics books for years at that point and the 8way* you read such books is very different from the way you read history books. I was accustomed to reading each sentence, thinking it over, making sure I fully understood it, and then moving on. That made it impossible to complete the reading assignment for the course I was taking in history.

I had to learn how to read subjects other than math and science.

When it comes to literature, the truth or falsity of the story is far less important than the way it makes you think about things. I don't consider literature as carrying TRUTH, but rather as providing *insight*. It has you look at things in a different way. And, hopefully, that different way of thinking produces value.

On a side note: I have never really understood the difference between metaphor and simile. Sure, there is a *grammatical* difference in whether you are using 'like' or 'as', but so what? Both are saying essentially the same thing, making an analogy between things, right?

[Spongebob]

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.

I don't disagree with your comments, but understand that the context of this action in California was regarding the use of this book as a tool to discuss racism and it didn't involve removing the books so much as replacing them with something better suited to the task.  When you ask the question, which classics should a student read, the context is completely different.  There have been schools that have banned TKAM outright from the school due to its graphic nature and I'm passionately opposed to that.  I think in some cases this can be easily explained by lazy educators who make a hasty decision based on a few poorly considered complaints about language in a book.  They just don't like getting calls from angry parents, so they do the easiest thing possible.

[downbeatplumb]

When my son was young I read Tom Sawyer  to him.  The copy of the book was out of a collection I had as a child.  It was the original prose and had not been cleaned up to make it PC.  Since we were living in the backwoods of the South I used the language in the book to teach him that certain words aren't acceptable and why.  I also explained to him that he would hear people using the same words but that didn't make it okay.  We had a brief talk about how old the book was and how things have changed, or should have changed, since the time of the writing.  

It was done as an aside and we went back to enjoying the story.  I left it open to him to ask questions and we worked through any confusion he had.

I don't agree with taking a book like Tom Sawyer or To Kill a Mockingbird off the shelves.  They can be used as a teaching tool while still telling a good story.

Hiding a book, or anything else, from kids makes it that much more interesting to them in my experience.  You can't keep those books from them forever...nor should you if you want to instill a love of literature.

Am I right in assuming that the worrisome character in the book is actually sympathetic. I think context is key to some things and throwing out a progressive book because sentiments have moved on would be a slippery slope. 

Juliet in Romeo and Juliet was supposed to be 13, should we dump what is one of the best romancs ever because the late middle ages were a bit un pc?

Anyway here's Garry Glitter and rockin rollin christmas.

[Spongebob]

Am I right in assuming that the worrisome character in the book is actually sympathetic. I think context is key to some things and throwing out a progressive book because sentiments have moved on would be a slippery slope. 

Juliet in Romeo and Juliet was supposed to be 13, should we dump what is one of the best romancs ever because the late middle ages were a bit un pc?

We are meant to see the injustice blacks face through the innocent eyes of young Scout and have fatherly Atticus explain it to us in a way that children can comprehend, among other themes in the books.  Racist characters do behave as we expect and another female character was raped, though in the book it was described as "taken advantage of".  Nevertheless some parents apparently have zero appetite for their children being introduced adult concepts in school.  It is a shame because it seems that civilization keeps pushing the age of adolescence farther and farther out.  Children in their early teens were once of marrying age and would have been working for years, but now are only expected to go to school and play.  I think we underestimate what children can do and understand.  What I see most often from younger people is sheer boredom with life.