The story, conveyed to us in spoken word, poem, novel, television show, film, or any of the other myriad forms it may take, is at the very heart of what it is to be human. This brilliant usurpation of mere instinct provides us with the unique capacity to transcend, however briefly or transparently, the absolute singularity of the mind. This most fundamental of human interaction is, then, the arbiter of the most fundamental of human conflicts. In our struggles – derived from no less than other, older stories – the story necessarily becomes the object of our objections. But what stories ought we be allowed to tell? As long as there are authors there will be censors. As long as we are human there will be both. But at what cost does the story come? At what cost its censorship? Oceans of ink and blood have been spilled over our right to speak, but what of our right to hear, or worse yet, to listen? Who determines the stories we can tell and have told to us? Who should? Having now offered up this purgatory of hyperbole, let us now turn towards the more pragmatic concerns of censorship today – beginning with the lens of history – and perhaps find our way back to these more universal questions.

We must go rather far back to find one of the most intriguing victims of censorship in the history of the written word. The Yahwist or Jehovist or, more succinctly, “J” composed the earliest written portions of what later became the Torah around 950 BC. The Yahwist composed portions of the Book of Numbers, the first half of Exodus, and about half of Genesis. As G. Douglas Atkins puts it, the Yahwist is “stubbornly restless, probing, skeptical, constantly engaged in an effort to demystify and demythologize, attempting to reveal the constructed-ness and fictionality of all things.” (Atkins, 1980) The original work of the Yahwist would be subject to near constant censorship and revision over the five centuries that followed. The God of the Yahwist was, as Harold Bloom succinctly puts it, “human – all too human: he eats and drinks, frequently loses his temper, delights in his own mischief, is jealous and vindictive, proclaims his justness while constantly playing favorites, and develops a considerable case of neurotic anxiety when he allows himself to transfer his blessing from an elite to the entire Israelite host. By the time he leads that crazed and suffering rabblement through the Sinai wilderness, he has become so insane and dangerous, to himself and to others, that the J writer deserves to be called the most blasphemous of all authors ever.” (Bloom, 1994) That creative redacting, following through to Ezra, is one of the earliest examples of censorship. Such a God was ill-suited to provide the contrast with the vindictive deities of the pagan traditions that allowed Judaism to grow beyond the few nomadic followers of Yahweh of its early years.

In 25 AD the historical works of Aulus Cremutius Cordus were burned by order of the Senate, supposedly for having eulogized Brutus and Cassius in what was viewed as an unduly positive light – quite evidentiary of that other most prominent cause of censorship: politics. Two factors comprise the authority behind which censorship is almost always employed – the political, as demonstrated by the burning of Cordus’ work, and the moral, the latter usually couched in a particular religious tradition, and the two often intertwined. Examples of both litter the remaining pages of history, most graphically in instances of book burning. Priscillian of Ávila, who bears the distinction of being the first in the long line of Christians executed for heresy by fellow Christians, had many of his writings deemed heretical and burned in 383. In 650 Caliph Uthman ibn ‘Affan oversaw the creation of the Qur’an as we now know it, and subsequently had all other versions destroyed. Over the course of the 13^th Century the Catholic Church systematically exterminated the Cathar sects of southeastern France, in the process burning nearly all of their writings. In 1242 the French government burned every copy of the Talmud in Paris following a trial in which the book was “found guilty.” In 1410 John Wycliffe, intellectual leader of the Lollards whose protégée Jan Huss would pioneer the giving of mass in the vernacular, had his books burned by Zbynek Zajic z Házmburka, Archbishop of Prague, who, incidentally, could not read. In 1562 the Bishop of the Yucatan, Fray Diego de Landa, burned the sacred texts of the Maya. In 1624 the Pope ordered the burning of Luther’s translation of the Bible in Germany. In 1683 students and faculty at Oxford burned a number of works by Hobbes and others. In 1842 the School for the Blind in Paris burned all the books they had containing the newly created Braille code.

This brings us to perhaps the most notorious instance of book burning in history, which was committed by the Nazis beginning on May 10, 1933 at the Humboldt University and Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexuality) in Berlin. The precursor to that fateful night took the form of the Harmful Publications Act of 1926, which was instituted by the Weimar government. Klaus Petersen sums up well the terrific importance of this act: “Its significance lies in the fact that, more than any other censorship law of the time, it owed its emergence to broadly based groups and organization that persistently tried to mold public opinion morally and ideologically to their own patterns of thought and behavior.”(Petersen, 1992) Seven years later, when over 25,000 “un-German” books were burned in Berlin, it was the students of Germany’s universities who did the burning. They burned Bertolt Brecht and Alfred Kerr, Ernest Hemingway and Marc Chagall, Friedrich Engels and Jack London, Upton Sinclair and H.G. Wells. But what was the nature of this action? It clearly wasn’t purely anti-Semitic in nature, as all the authors were not Jews. Censorship, wrote Harrell Rodgers, originates, at least in part, from a question of status. “When public policies are formulated they answer a critical question: ‘On behalf of what ethnic, religious, or other cultural group is this government and this society being carried out?’ (Gusfield, 1963). Thus, governmental policies concerning civil rights, religion, welfare, and obscenity all involve the weighing of the government’s influence on the side of one set of values as opposed to others… Censorship campaigns involve defense of traditional moral standards and the societal position of those who defend those standards. Changes in the definition of acceptable sexual speech raise questions about the validity of the moral standards considered sacred by some members of society and questions about the dominant culture in society… Censorship campaigns, therefore, involve attempts to restore to prominence a certain value system or efforts to make certain that new values do not make serious inroads into the community.” (Rodgers, 1975)

Two decades later, in 1953, a similar phenomenon took place in the United States, under the banners of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist zealotry. At McCarthy’s urging, the State Department removed from the shelves of its libraries in Europe “material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc.” Some of these books were subsequently burned. This, too, was a case of censorship in pursuit of the maintenance of a societal position. The communists were to be feared, and were to be rooted out wherever they were. America had turned fiercely xenophobic in war time, the Japanese internment camps were evidence enough of that, and McCarthy sought to wipe out any dissention in order to maintain that apprehension. Fear was, of course, the source of his power. In the absence of any communist literature or argument, it would be much easier to prove to the public how dangerous they were for it would be impossible for communists, or their so-called sympathizers, to argue otherwise.

The defining characteristic in these actions is, of course, the involvement of government or political authority. In turning towards the issues of censorship we face in the United States today, this kind of government involvement largely does not exist. Attempts have been made, but by and large (excluding free speech issues as engaged in campaign finance and the like) have been struck down by the courts as clear violations of Constitutional mandates. What we are faced with, then, is not censorship of the people by the government, but rather censorship of the people by themselves. That McCarthy was eventually struck down by a domestic popular backlash, unlike the Nazis, is evidentiary of Americans’ stubbornness in the defense of their liberties. But that tenacity seems to be leveled most ferociously when it is the government which oversteps its bounds – and it is not the government itself which gives greatest cause for concern.

The censorship we face today comes in many shapes and sizes, largely irrespective of political ideology. Conservative religious organizations stage burnings of Harry Potter novels, seek to regulate sexual material in films and television shows, and try to pull morally objectionable materials from library shelves. Abortion rights activists seek limitations on anti-abortion picketers at clinics. In the modern United States, purely political censorship has become a dangerous gambit, and is rarely practiced. Correspondingly, the bulk of our would-be censors come forth individually or in extra-governmental groups from a pedestal of perceived moral superiority – a superiority they seek to demonstrate to, and to impress upon, their opposition. This fight is, not unexpectedly, often focused on the access of children to material perceived by parents to be morally questionable, which leads us to one of the most highly publicized censorship battles of our time: Harry Potter.

Zeeland, Michigan and its 5,800 residents played host to one notable brawl over J.K. Rowling’s magical children’s series. Eight years ago school Superintendent Gary Feenstra, at the behest of several parents, removed the series from library shelves, banned their reading in classrooms, required parental approval for access to them, and stopped the further purchase of copies of the books. Similar moves took place in school districts all over the country – coinciding with highly publicized public burnings of the novels. The courts have – rightly – removed such restrictions on the books in libraries and school districts nationwide. Nonetheless, these actions, repeated time and again with books considered “inappropriate” for one reason or another, constitute a dangerous element in our civic culture if left unchecked.

I do not intend to say that fighting to have certain books removed from library shelves or classrooms is inherently wrong. It is not. There should certainly be restrictions placed upon what children can read or watch. Those restrictions, however, should not be dictated by the whims of handfuls of vocal parents. In 2002 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill issued as its summer reading “Approaching the Qur’an”, a text on the Islamic holy book, and controversy erupted. The cries of Muslim advocacy and anti-Christian indoctrination were predictable, and boisterous, and the dynamics which fueled them were the same which have always fed the flames of book pyres. It was a lashing out of orthodoxy and heavy-handed, willful ignorance. Of course there were denunciations of UNC as having committed a crime, in Bill O’Reilly’s words, equivalent to assigning Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in 1941. It is that very blatant kind of dissimilitude that makes such efforts at censorship so patently ridiculous. I would think a more rational comparison would be an Islamic school mandating the study of the Bible in 1187 as Philip II and Richard I descended upon the Holy Land.  Of course, to some in this country, as has been the case everywhere and at every time, any attempt to understand that which is alien to us comes to be perceived as some kind of concession — a surrender of some fraction of that abstraction that makes us American.  What danger is there in the pursuit of understanding?  Some would have it that it is a step towards an unwanted pluralism, the calls of the Know-Nothings echoing out of the darker, meaner halls of history.  Others may simply fear the humanization of a foe.  How much harder it is to wage war when the bombs are landing on human beings, not devils made flesh!  Some, perhaps, merely lash out at anything beyond the standard American lexicon.  It is a misguided adventure, whatever the motivation.

But do not get me wrong, it is well within the rights of those who challenge books or television shows or movies to do so, just as it is within their rights to withhold them from their children, for a time. But exercising such outrageous arrogance as to withhold ideas, legitimate or not, controversial or tame, without even consideration of the needs and desires of those from whom they are being withheld is, dare I say it, fundamentally un-American. There will always be those who seek to protect others from what they view as obscene, corrupting, inappropriate or unpatriotic. A driving purpose of our democracy and of our humanity is, then, to protect that which we value in spite of these denunciations. We are dependent upon the free exchange of ideas, and we must view it as our sacred duty to protect that exchange whenever possible. We are perpetually engaged in the struggle between past and future, and I, for one, will side with the future. There is no greater freedom than the ability to seek out new ideas and information, regardless of how contrary to an individual’s personal beliefs those ideas may be. There is no danger to the individual in the dissemination of ideas. The greater the conflict between our ideas, and the lesser our conflict over which ideas we may consider, the better our ideas will become. The danger that some would proscribe as threatening our youth or our righteousness is a danger that only presents itself to those institutions that perpetuate our shortcomings. There is no permissible way to limit this attack on change and openness – it would be the very icon of self-defeatism. There is only one path for the determined advocate of choice to take, and that is to read, to watch, to listen, to disagree and agree when the evidence presents itself, to question, to answer, to debate and to discuss. Our inquisitive minds burn hotter than any paper, and we must use that inextinguishable flame to fight fire with fire.

Those who choose to denounce the cries of indecency in the name of personal choice, responsibility, and intellectual freedom have given the world access to Joyce, Salinger, Hemingway, Galileo, Socrates, Goethe, Aristophanes, Hawthorne, Greene, Orwell, Pynchon, Steinbeck, Morrison, Boccaccio, Faulkner, Flaubert, Whitman, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Paine, Heller, Balzac, Bradbury, Dreiser, and Rabelais, all of whom were or are subject to the censor’s ire. I, for my part, am thrilled to have such company.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!