February 23, 2022
Thinking More About Freedom
Today I went back and updated a list I’d put up at 49thShelf.com a few years ago, a list of challenged or banned Canadian books on the occasion of Freedom to Read Week. And I realized that my thoughts about censorship had been complicated in the years since I’d last checked out the list, when the idea of banning a book for its gratuitous sex or LGBTQ content seemed patently absurd and I was wholly onside with every person’s right to read Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, never mind all the fucking (which was, not coincidentally, all the pages in my copy at which the spine had been broken). Freedom to read had once seemed easy to believe in.
But reading through the annotated list of challenged books, I was reminded that these things are complicated. Should the library in Victoria, BC, have gotten rid of their copy of Mog and the Granny, by Judith Kerr, because of its outdated terminology and stereotyped images of Indigenous people? Maybe yes? And is there a reason to retain the Dr. Seuss book with ethnic stereotyping? Maybe possibly? And how is this example different? (Spoiler: all kinds of ways!)
It occurs to me that this is why we have librarians, that libraries and all book collections require curating and culling, and that this is kind of thing is complicated, yet another issue for which asking questions is perhaps more important than having answers.
Something I’ve found curious in public discourse over the past few years is the forefronting of free speech as a fundamental tenet of our society. Not because free speech is not important, but why is it more important than, say, income equality, or physical safety, or access to education, or environmental protections? This question is complicated by the fact that the free speech question has been hitched to the wagons of all kinds of bad actors, that it’s possible to build a powerful platform on the basis of “cancel culture” backlash, and that far too often these conversations are ideologically driven and thoroughly devoid of intellectual curiosity. Sunlight is turning out not to be the best disinfectant, but instead an amplifier of hate and misinformation, and there are plenty of forces who are counting on that.
Voltaire never said it either, but there are more than a few people to whom I’d never utter the phrase, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I continue to think that these are the abstract principles that sound perfectly reasonable when you assume that all things are equal, except they’re really not, and there are all kinds of factors in play, including race and gender, that only seem irrelevant if they’ve never factored in your experience. There’s a lot of hyperbole around harm, this is true (see Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse), but there’s a lot of “free speech” out there that’s pretty dangerous, disingenuous, and can hurt other people in demonstrable ways—vaccine disinformation, for example.
It felt weird to consider Freedom to Read Week in the context of 2022, after five years of living in an era in which free speech has been weaponized by some of the most awful people for personal/financial gain. I still very much believe in the principles of free speech and anti-censorship, but I no longer think that these things are uncomplicated or straightforward. The whole thing making me quite uncomfortable…but maybe that’s the point, that it’s supposed to.
And with all that in mind, this afternoon I listened to Brene Brown’s conversation with Ben Wizner of the ACLU, “Free Speech, Misinformation, and the Case for Nuance,” which was fascinating. I learned so much, had ideas clarified, and even changed my mind, which is a true sign that one is really thinking after all. The greatest takeaway was that it’s not big tech’s content moderation we should be blaming for undermining and eroding democracy, but instead their monopolies and their hoarding of resources which are working to hollow out the middle class in America and elsewhere, which perhaps might be the biggest thread to democracy of all.
