Consuming and Banning Books
Language, and particularly the written language, is laden with power. Writing allows a single person to spread information, perspective, point of view, knowledge, and, occasionally, wisdom to the entire world. Especially now, a message can burn through the world, reaching out to and touching the lives of the billions of humans that are alive today. Not only that, the written word is an envoy to the future. Tolstoy is dead and has been for over a century, but I have pieces of his mind on my bookshelf, and those parts of Tolstoy interact with and shape parts of me. This is the avowed and cherished power of books. They connect hearts and minds over time and space. I can pick up a copy of Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky and know and be comforted by the fact that if I’m crazy, Dostoevsky was crazy with me. But in the worst case, words are an assault on the future. They are a spell which lingers in the world, a fragment of a mind waiting to seep into and shape the thoughts of an unsuspecting future reader. This is why histories are contextualized. This is why books are banned. This is why books are burned.
Burning books requires a belief in their efficacy. You must believe that a book can change lives, minds, and beliefs before you burn them. There’s a book burning in the Bible. New converts to Christianity gather their books of magic and burn them in the sight of all. This is a symbol of devotion as well as an act of necessity. destruction. The former magicians and sorcerers believe their books have power, and a power which cannot be allowed to snare others. When we ban books because they’re antiracist or stop reading books because the authors were antisemitic, we treat the books like spells. Reading Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates will without fail make white people feel guilty for their race. Reading Charles Murry will make people racist, because of the racism in the works. Whatever the content of a book, it will have an inescapable hold over the reader, therefore they must not be read.
However, I don’t actually think people believe in the efficacy of books. Most people don’t actually read books. And as much as I would like people to believe that everyone with a pen is a wizard, we think of themselves as consumers. Even if this is mostly unconscious it shapes the way we speak and the way we think. We consume content. People that read a lot are voracious. And we come to the way we interact with media like the way we interact with food. We take food into our bodies and that is where our conscious control ends. If the food is high in sugars or fats, sugars and fats are incorporated into our bodies. If a food is poisonous, we die. Consumption and especially digestion are completely passive. We cannot change what food is after we eat it. Food changes us in a way that is completely predictable and understood before the food is ever consumed. That's why bodybuilders eat protein, and dieters cut out sugar and fat. ‘Banning’ certain things from the realms of food is actually effective for keeping us away from harm. That’s why bathroom chemicals are child proof and we don’t drink bleach. They’re poison and there’s nothing to do other than never put them in our mouths. So we don’t treat Kendi, Coates, or Murry as wizards. We treat them as poisons, against which we can do nothing other than keep them out of reach of children.
This isn’t how ideas work. It’s not how books work. It is possible to read a book and disagree with it. I just read the Republic by Plato. Socrates (who does most of the speaking in the book) thinks the best society is a military run aristocracy without poets or literature. I don’t suddenly find myself trying to live like a Spartan, I think Socrates is wrong. There can be good and bad in a book. Dostoevsky can be antisemitic, but he can also be insightful. I’ve read Kendi, Coates, and Murry. Between the World and Me helped me see things from a new perspective, but I think Coates is too quick to dismiss the power of the Black Church. Kendi rightfully keeps our feet to the fire on racial differences in wealth and life expectancy, but I’m skeptical of his proposed oversight solutions. Coming Apart by Charles Murry is underrated as an anticipation of our increasing educational polarization, which is not nullified by (neither does it excuse) the racism in the Bell Curve. Ideas, like chemical cleaners, aren’t meant to be consumed. They’re meant to be used. Using them can reveal something new or forgotten. They can help maintain things in our lives which should last. Using ideas recognizes our own strength to disagree, our own strength to say things in a different way.
Consumption of ideas necessitates book banning and silencing problematic voices. If you eat a donut, you can’t digest a salad. You have to avoid the donuts in the first place. So it goes that we can’t engage with ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ ideas, because we will inevitably digest ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ ideas. We have to forgo these ideas all together and replace them with ‘healthy’ options. But that’s not how ideas or books work. I know people who can consume a popcorn flick, and digest it like it's full of vitamins, fiber, and protein. I try to do that here by taking things like Stardew Valley seriously. Ideas are an interaction between you and the idea. You can accept it, reject it, or anywhere in between. Mere consumption gives enormous power to books and authors. It makes them wizards to shape reality and history in the way they see it. Burning books is one way to confront that power. Another way is to deny the power of ideas to completely mold us by actively engaging with them. Because some ideas have had horrible consequences, but some ideas have done good, and can still do good in our lives. And the difference is not always clear, let alone self evident. Discernment takes wisdom, and wisdom isn’t born from consumption. It grows out of struggle, experience, and engagement. So, read something you disagree with (without assuming you’ll disagree before you start). Even if it doesn’t convince you of anything, which it might, use it to work out why you disagree, what you actually believe, and why you believe it. And if you disagree with me, convince me.
