COMMENTARY: Nothing More Odious Than Illiteracy as Policy

Is anyone else tired of stupid governing our politics? Don’t we have better things to do?

by Shaun Kenney
COLUMNIST

One of the things that surprised me with the launch of the Fredericksburg Advance is that our politics are much more polarized than they were just 10 years ago.  The number of letters were few, but pointed enough to express shock that conservatives would write alongside progressives, and vice versa.  In short, we can’t even talk about the things that matter unless we are throwing rocks.  What’s worse, the demagogues have taken over the democracy, and that isn’t good for our community much less the way we talk about what we share in common.

Case in point?  The very idea that in America, we should be expected to understand the other side of an argument before we can build our own?  That’s offensive, to which the late Christopher Hitchens would have asked “…and what’s your point?”  

If the Latin holds true, then an education worthy of the name should be an ex ducare – challenging a person to break out of their own shell and challenge their own thought, the active leading forth of a soul capable of determining for themselves between what is good and evil, between virtue and the vicious, and between beauty and smut – and choosing the good, virtuous and beautiful precisely because they are good, virtuous, and beautiful. 

Which brings us to the touchy subject of book banning in quick order.  

This argument over who-reads-what has to be the dumbest, most ignorant, most illiterate and stupidest debate on the history of God’s green earth.  After just opining on the way we talk about things, there is nothing more poisonous to self-government than a handful of grifters pushing around decent people without good men and women standing up and telling them to crawl back into their holes (pace C.S. Lewis). 

The worst part is the wasted energy.  Imagine leaving all the other problems of the world unresolved just so you can peer over your neighbor’s shoulder with the intensity of an East German Stasi officer and present the question: “Vat is this your children are reading, mein frau?”

I thought we beat the Soviets?

This is America.  

The only respectable answer?  None of your damned business.

The Western Canon vs. the Book Banners?

Just to make sure we are clear, I find efforts to ban Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn odious in the extreme.  Editing Dr. Seuss?  I’m sorry, but “that’s offensive!” is not an argument made by respectable people.

Which brings us to those who scour our libraries looking for reasons to be offended.

I’ll admit — there books that I would never include on my bookshelf.  Perhaps other parents have a higher degree of latitude about things I would consider to be smut.  Or simply bad literature, bad history, anti-Catholic or anti-Western propaganda.

Yet when the Spotsylvania County Public Schools – and by extension, handlers within the Youngkin administration operating by cute and clever half measures so as not to be blamed for the blowback – attempt to cast their web against smut by leveraging the Code of Virginia 18.2-390, the definitions themselves ensnare the very books most conservatives seek to return to the classroom – and it’s not just the Great Books of the Western Canon.  

Let’s get into the weeds on this one, shall we?  

By using the Code of Virginia as the litmus test, they have instituted a line so firm that even the Holy Bible does not pass muster.  The Book of Genesis?  The Song of Solomon?  How’s about 1 Samuel 8 where Saul demands the foreskins of 100 Philistines before David can marry his daughter, and David goes out and collects 200 foreskins.  OF DUDES.

When was the last time anyone watched the blood and gore of Shakespearian theater?  Juliet was 13.  Shylock’s “pound of flesh” wasn’t exactly four Quarter Pounder meals from the local McDonalds.  Precisely where was the “unkindest cut of all” in Julius Caesar?  It wasn’t his tax rate, folks.

Oh – and forget Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  The Wife of Bath’s adventures could have been filmed in Trump Tower.  The Miller’s Tale?  The Cook’s Tale?!  We learned this in 7^th grade, ladies and gentlemen… 

How does Dante’s Inferno survive this attempt?  The very first Canto depicts sex, violence, murder, and bestiality in a depiction of temptation and lust on the path to hell.  

How does To Kill a Mockingbird fare?  This book, once put on the banned book list in middle school classrooms in Mississippi, probably deserves a deeper reading in a world where lynch mobs have merely moved online.  Tom Robinson is innocent of rape; guilty of something else – hashtag Me Too? 

When our definitions throw the Great Books out of the classroom, that should worry parents who understand that the purpose of an education is to transmit culture.  When the interpretation of the rules is so stringent as to ban Shakespeare and the Holy Bible?  That should strike every reader as utterly absurd.

The Antidote to Stupid is Free Inquiry and Literacy

So why are we talking about this nonsense?  Mostly, I want to remind readers that the things some people want us to talk about really aren’t worth talking about.  Just politically driven in the hopes of creating a wedge to run against.

Book banning is stupid.
We all know it is stupid.
They know that we know that it is stupid.
We know that they know that we know it is stupid.
And it is stupid no matter who is proposing the banning.

So why are we allowing the objectively stupid to govern our politics?  

For myself, the things that are good, beautiful and true prevail in the world precisely because they are good, beautiful and true.  Do we pursue the good imperfectly?  Of course we do; that’s human nature.   Yet you cannot eradicate viciousness in the world like some East German Stasi bureaucrat.  One does so in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, allowing reason to combat error, not through the enforcement of either sacred or secular religions.

Critics will argue that one can read banned books still, just not through public venues.  That is the argument of every totalitarian and tyrant in human history – and who decides?  Would you trust this power in the hands of your opposition?

Critics will further argue that we do not need one more log on the fire that is society today.  Yet the funny part about worldly things is that they are indeed mundane, vulgar, and boring – and they get old quickly.  Let the fire burn out, and the sooner the better. 

Critics will lastly bring the smut forward in open debate and ask whether one would allow their own children to read such things.  Yet the only true test of an education is the ability to weigh these scales.  Either we have confidence in the right because it is right, or we somehow believe that right opinion requires the assistance of law – a damning confession if there ever was one that maybe, just maybe, there is doubt in the rectitude of the opinions of tyrants over the minds of men.

Which rounds out the wider problem both political parties – Democrat and Republican – are failing to tackle. The fine line between virtue and vice is in the character of the human spirit.  Ban vice tomorrow, reminds John Milton in his Aeropagitica, and you do not eradicate the viciousness in the hearts of men.  Either we trust and respect one another with the inalienable rights endowed to us by our Creator in a spirit of free inquiry, or we start playing a game where we decide which half of society are our masters.   Therein lies a dangerous road, for as the German poet Goethe reminds us so well – “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.”

The only inoculation against this disease – and it is something we must commit ourselves to doing both in our daily lives and in society writ large — is though the tried and true method of consuming ideas, more ideas, and still even greater ideas and then discussing them openly, without fear of reprisal or coercion.

For myself, I refuse to consent to the idea that ideas should be banned from the public square, whether the little Robepierres call themselves progressives, conservatives, or paid agitators attached to political interests.  Let Jefferson’s admonishment prevail, “for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”