Blog 47 A Return to the Issue of Banned Books

 

With the reader’s indulgence, I’d like to return to the central issue of last month’s blog – book banning. As a resident of Virginia, I believe Governor Glenn Youngkin serendipitously latched onto an issue that carried him to the governorship, i.e. parental involvement in the public education of their children. The upside has been exactly that – parents seeking increased awareness of what their children are being taught. Of a concern (my opinion), a vocal group of parents protesting specific books found in school libraries relative to content of which they disapproved, have pressed to have those books banned. The books in question appear most often to have addressed issues related to sex, race or LGBTQ life. My sense: More often than not, the material objected to has been separated from a more complete contextual understanding.

Am I questioning the sincerity of parental concern in these matters? I am not. Do I fear a good, if misguided, intention gone awry? As I stated in my last blog, I do not believe banning a book is the answer to valid parental concern. Unless a child’s mind has been adulterated by the “adults” in charge of his or her development (all too common, I fear) or unbalanced by a genetic flaw or environmental injury (rare to my knowledge), I believe this recent uptick in concern that a particular book will warp a healthy child’s mind is imbedded in adult fear and its co-rider, ignorance.

As I did in the previous blog, permit me to use myself as an example of a legitimate concern distorted by ignorance. In my professional career, I was a Clinical Psychologist, a believer in knowledge gleaned from, among many things, hundreds of books I devoured. And yet, I fell prey, in a way, to this issue, allowing concern and ignorance lead me to make comments to my son in his early teens regarding his love for and pursuit of science fiction. For years, he’d read voraciously, but narrowly as it appeared to me. I pressed him to broaden his reading experience. In subsequent years, I was humbled to learn what a broad and deep swath of learning he’d extracted solely from sci-fi, including ideas about sex, race and the necessity of living with others different from him.

Coupled with my embarrassing admission that I’d avoided science fiction as a reading interest and therefore had rendered myself ignorant of it, I’d committed the same error in prejudgment I’m writing about here. Concern without knowledge could be a starting point leading to an option to educate oneself. Conversely, concern leading to emotional reaction without knowledge would seem premature at best, subject to diminishing parental effectiveness or worse.

So then, what is one to do when faced with a valid concern regarding the books our children might read? I do not believe the answer is to begin banning books. Beyond ourselves and teachers as sources for discussion about books our children read, one option I’d like to reiterate is to turn to the members of our society we’ve educated and trained to curate the books our children are exposed to for direction – our librarians. They can either appropriately guide us to the reading experiences we seek or to materials that offer in-depth reviews of the books we’re concerned about. When in doubt, let’s put our heads together with them.

           

Blog 46 - Banned Books

 

Blog 46

The frustration has ebbed, for now. I can think more calmly, a personal requirement whenever I attempt to address a sensitive issue with political overtones. In this instance, the issue is book banning.

Sometime in the late 1950’s, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in the United States, although bootleg copies published in newspaper format had been available years before. The sexual content was considered pornographic by American censors, primarily the Catholic Church. My mother, a college-educated progressive (in selective ways) obtained a copy, but asked me not to read it, even as she did. Her rationale, as best as I can recall: She wanted me to be able to discover my own emotionally-satisfying sexual life without having it scripted for me. I’m putting it that way to be kind toward and respectful of her intentions, although in retrospect I question them.

I was fourteen at the time, my thoughts and dreams often sexually driven. In some ways, she was too late. I hungered for anything that might further reveal or clarify this veiled fundament of life, the thing in fact that propelled it. The more knowledge of it was hidden, the more obsessive the impulse to know became.

An irony: My mother was a believer in books. At eight, she’d given me a thin pamphlet describing the biological facts of sex, shorn of any accompanying emotional explication. When it came time to give me “the talk,” she quailed and left me with the book and her faith in it. My father remained in another room during. Another irony: At eight, I had no conscious interest in sex and, therefore, was unable to formulate the questions she avoided. I was able to detect her odd discomfort in discussing the issue. A year later, at nine, my interest in females began, but the opportunity was gone and I wasn’t about to reintroduce it.

From these incidents, I became more aware than ever that, as a whole, it’s the adults who struggle with books, not children. As if banning them could ever erase the curiosity the issues arouse. Want to create a best seller? Ban it. You’ll send it underground to become a “cult” classic. Look at the samizdat industry in Soviet Russia. The communists could never extinguish it. I only wish most adults who seek to ban a book would read it first, in its entirety, the parts they object to in context, prior to.

It appears it’s never enough for some parents to object to a book out of concern for their children, their concerns often framed in religious or moral terms. I could accept it if they would act on their beliefs for their children and leave it at that. When they want to extend the impact of their personal concerns to ban what your children or mine read, then I have a problem.

This is the basis for cultural war. Do it loud enough and you may capture political attention. Politicians are always casting about for an issue that might strike a note among constituents. Once found, they’ll stir it to see if it bubbles up into a potential campaign plank. If it does, they’ll proceed to flog it. For them, it is foremost about getting elected. Whatever works, right? The problem? The rest of us are left with the aftereffects, including the unintended consequences, e.g. the right to decide for our children narrowed, eliminated or criminalized.

Currently, there are those who want to protect our children from anything historical that might make them uncomfortable and from anything that might help them understand their own emerging sexual feelings before we’re ready for them to. Our solution: To start by banning books which make us uncomfortable.

The Nazis took it a step farther and burned books, turning the act into a political spectacle. My mother knew this. In retrospect, I believe she was simultaneously trying to do something and not do it, i.e. trying to protect me from something she could not bring herself to fully explore, much less explain.

I see a parallel with book banning – parents trying to do something they believe will protect their children and not doing it by failing to understand what a book can and cannot do, and ultimately, by failing to trust our teachers and librarians. Beyond embattled teachers, our librarians represent a group educated to curate for us the books time alone will never allow us to read – which is most of them.

To me, the risk that a child will be adversely affected by a book is miniscule when compared to the increasing risk that same child will be slaughtered by a military weapon in a place that values book learning – a school.

Your thoughts?