Banning Books?

"Hey, kids! It's your old buddy Steve King telling you that if they ban a book in your school, haul your ass to the nearest bookstore or library ASAP and find out what they don't want you to read."

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) January 18, 2023

In the 200s BCE, the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti tried to bury history to make it restart with him by burning Confucian works…a couple of hundred years later, Rome banned the Roman poet Ovid for writing?Ars Amatoria?(The Art of Love). In 1497, all of Ovid’s works were burned by the Florentine Savonarola - and the US Customs banned an English translation of?Ars Amatoria?in 1928!

Then we have the legendary tale of the Library at Alexandria where, in 640, two hundred thousand books were burned by the caliph Omar?(and apparently used to fire the city baths) because, as he supposedly put it: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.” Of course, the ignorant, self-righteous bigotry of horrors surrounding that event were not limited to such pyres...as, for example, depicted below:

The Roman Catholic Church established the?Index Librorum Prohibitorum?in 1559 as a listing of banned books… a list that remain “in power” for centuries.

In 1859, the library of Trinity College, Cambridge banned Charles Darwin’s?Origin of Species?and, between 1925 and 1967, the teaching of evolution was banned in Tennessee schools (we’ve seen elements of that continuing until today).?Indeed, “Origin of Species”?has been variously banned elsewhere/elsewhen (like in Yugoslavia in 1935 and in Greece in 1937).

And who can forget the fires of the Nazis in 1933 - bonfires of books, in the main, written by Jews and communists censored to destruction out of pure bigotry.

Beatrix Potter was banned in London in the ‘80s because all the rabbits were middle-classed! Whereas, in the same decade, Salman Rushdie’s?“The Satanic Verses”?was repeatedly burned and banned around the world?-?criticized as blaspheming Islam. Then we have Harry Potter and the political correctness censorship we all know about.?

More recently, we have the idea that the juxtaposed positions of the Light and Dark sides of The Force in George Lucas’s Star Wars are politically incorrect? ?Will Peter Jackson’s (frankly quite amazing) cinematic production of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” soon find itself subject to similarly belligerent denials? ?After all, the elves seem uniformly pale whilst the orcs and their ilk are dark. ?Is that also to now be deemed passively racist and justified for censor?

What benefit has come from such acts? The books, even before the “internet age” still got out there, still got read - and, in many cases, got read far more widely than they might otherwise have been. Of course, we’ve also lost irreplaceable history and art (Alexandria being arguably the most egregious and horrific such event).

But, even if the history seems lost, it is not.

We were always taught in school that our knowledge of history comes from two sources: primary and secondary. Primary sources, being contemporary (or thereabouts) with the events themselves (artefacts or writings from the time), are ostensibly less prone to bias - although bias by interpretation and that old maxim about being documented by the winners (or by biased people at the time) could still obscure the view. (Thus, for example, the controversy and debate over Biblical translations and adaptations and edits and purges...and the Gnostic Gospels.) Secondary sources, those written in a time period after the events being recorded/referenced are arguably far less objective and, as we are seeing, subject to deletion, omission and denial.

Despite all such obstacles - both intrinsic and asserted, we cannot change history by denying it or hiding it, we cannot stifle opinion and art by censoring it; we will only subvert it, drive it underground and onto the Dark Web, with all the consequential temptations of such forbidden fruit! Similarly, how can we educate by denying knowledge, by denying opinion, by limiting variety and diversity and the opportunity to weigh and judge and feed the minds of our children??

Censorship is not, and never has been, the answer - especially not when used purely as a cover for prejudice (ignorance propagating ignorance). Our way forward can only, surely, be by training our children to measure information, to evaluate sources, to exercise and develop their own critical censor - tuned over an eclectic array of acquired experience and proffered knowledge and wisdom.?

Books are vital in this.

They offer us escapism, learning, bonding, enlightenment, understanding and a glimpse into the mind of another - perhaps another long dead. History is, sadly, not absolute though - at least not an absolute for us to know. It is a perspective, even if one we can debate with greater or lesser backing evidence. Regardless, history is still an absolute in its reality, in that it happened; and the only way to glimpse it, to begin to hope to see it and know it, is to sample it as widely as possible.

Our future generations can be learned and wise and enquiring, or listless, gullible and awaiting to be spoon-fed whatever drivel holds sway. That choice of direction is one we make now.