The greatest orator, save one of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversaries case with as great if not still greater intensity than even his own. What Cicero practices as a means of forensic success requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
– From On Liberty – John Stuart Mill
I recently read a guest opinion piece in the New York Times called The Battle for the Soul of the Library by Stanley Kurtz. Doctor Kurtz is a conservative think tank scholar who has written many books, one of which warned us about the terrifying socialist president Barack Obama (guess he sort of missed the mark on that one). In the The Battle for the Soul of the Library, he laments that the current “woke” politics have infiltrated the profession of the librarian and has made it so the library is no longer a place for classical liberal scholarship and neutrality. Librarians are now doing their job with political motivations, recommending books by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky over David Brooks, Stanley Kurtz and Donald Trump. Our current times have revived culture wars over books and libraries but in the end, it is all a bit silly for a variety of reasons.
One, most people and and especially kids do not actually read books that much in the first place. I can safely say that before the internet and smart phones, going to high school and college meant a lot more reading of books. Today, reading takes place primarily on the internet. Rarely do I see the youth actually with their noses in a book – and why would you read an entire book on your phone? Second, librarians have been usurped by Google, Wikipedia and the internets. If someone wants to learn about a topic or find a book, they probably do not go to the library and ask a librarian. More likely they search on the internets and eventual read reviews on Amazon. The battle is really a false battle. Librarians are not the social movers of our day. Search algorithms and creepy fine-tuned marketing campaigns are far more powerful.
It is the year 2022. What book banning has to do about is what version of history is sanctioned and approved. Do we teach the same history that was taught in 1950? Do we emphasize and obsess about George Washington surely cutting down a cherry tree or that at the time most wealthy White Americans owned slaves? Is it about how the Pilgrims and the Indians must have gotten along and shared food or about how the United States government reneged on the treaties with Native Americans? Do we include the Tulsa massacres into history books or airbrush this significant historical event out of the record? Is it about whether presidential records can be flushed down the toilet or are taped back together to get some sort of objectivity.
This sort of dilemma is challenging for both the political right and left. The mostly White Republican party wants nothing to do with the fact that the country is a complicated place that is built upon racism and slavery. They want to fly their flags and be proud to be White and American. They want to flush the unsavory parts of our past down the toilet. Perhaps this is one of the reason why they glom onto Donald Trump.
On the left, they want nothing of the writings of Ayn Rand and Adam Smith as they are surely White and racist but prefer the kids read the latest hurried publications or perhaps Marx and Engels. But reading books by dead white guys is just so out of fashion. What could they possibly know?
Libraries are great places and important in society. A library card is a passport to a whole new world, however because I always forget to return books on time, I more often frequent books stores. The biggest tragedy with the library happened when they digitized everything. No longer do you get to have your book stamped in the back with the return date when you check it out. You could look at that date and all the other dates stamped and get a sense of time and community. I do sometimes buy books at library sales when they cull and discard books that people are not reading. It is amazing what treasures you can find.