Whenever the topic of “banned books” comes up, a bunch of people argue about whether they should be called “banned”.
What I haven’t seen mentioned in these discussions is where the mental association of “banned books” comes from.
In America, at least, the school curriculum spends a lot of time talking about dictators. It mentions, numerous times over many years of a child’s life, that something dictators often do is to ban books that could make people question them or that could make people support people the dictator doesn’t like, etc. In all such cases covered in the school curriculum, dictators’ “banned books” are not allowed to be sold in the country at all, and are often destroyed, sometimes even in mass burnings.
So, this is the psychological association people typically have with the phrase “banned books”.
The news articles over the past X years declaring something like “Government Y bans books!” seem to be leveraging this mental association to give people the emotional impression that Government Y is doing dictatorships things. I think this is why people get annoyed, since not allowing whatever books in the school library is not a dictator thing (okay dictators do it but it’s like drinking milk or being against animal cruelty, it’s not something that is primarily done by dictators).
So, when people say that not allowing a book in a school library is a type of ban, they are correct, but they ignore this association which most people have from school.
The “banned books” theme has become intentionally vague because it has become a marketing tool.
That’s how we got to Dua Lipa doing a promotional photo op holding up books that can be purchased on Amazon and delivered to your Kindle to read immediately. Attaching the “banned” word to a book turns the purchase into an act of rebellion and a reason to talk about it, and the marketers are not going to waste that opportunity.
That’s why the “banned books” category has been expanded so much to include not only books that governments or corporations have tried to suppress, but also books that some school board in Kansas decided shouldn’t be included in the elementary school library.
Unfortunately once a term becomes this overloaded it loses meaning. The original topics of government censorship and oppression get less attention because it’s drowned out by pop stars holding up Margaret Atwood books for photo ops and people buying books on Amazon as a form of slacktivism.
Banning a book in a school district still signifies a form of authoritarianism. If someone is prevented from reading Maus[0] (or finding out they are in a cult, or a victim of domestic abuse), what is the effective difference to them between an authoritarian censoring it at the national level or the local one?
We "ban" things from school kids all the time, though: Pornography, gambling, smoking, alcohol, R-rated movies.
Dua Lipa wasn't doing a photo op with Maus. In the photos she's posing with modern books that are still being promoted by their publishers. I'm not familiar with all of them, but a quick search shows one of them is not appropriate for elementary schools because it includes essays debating which sexual acts are appropriate for feminists to perform and other adult topics. Why is it "authoritarianism" to say that a book like that doesn't belong in my kids' school library?
This is a promotional stunt, and I'm surprised more people aren't seeing through it.
> We "ban" things from school kids all the time, though: Pornography, gambling, smoking, alcohol, R-rated movies.
And no one really pretended that these cases were cases of "banned books".
The problem is when authority bodies (school, government, ...) start to include, in these "normal non-appropriate" books other books not because they have bad societal consequences when the reader is not mature enough, but because they don't like the content for ideological reasons.
I think it would be a very bad faith argument to argue that reading Maus will lead to people less socially adjusted.
And, sure, some "banned" books may be inappropriate. But as soon as these authorities have open the doors to arbitrary banning books, they poisoned their own well: maybe under "normal" evaluation this book should be removed from the list, but they removed it "the bad way", they failed the process, and therefore the ban itself is illegitimate.
It's a bit like the procedural miscarriage of justice: if you mess up when arresting someone, they can be freed even if it turns out they were guilty. Or in a more topical subject: the Fifa can reverse some decision, but if they do it in the context where they received phone calls from the US president, then it's a big failure in the process, even if a "normal" re-evaluation should indeed have concluded to reversing the decision.
> not because they have bad societal consequences when the reader is not mature enough, but because they don't like the content for ideological reasons
“Bad societal consequences” is entirely subjective, though. This is the crux of the issue.
Saying "entirely subjective" is a bit BS, don't you think?
On one hand, you have someone who says that exposing children to sexual or violent content can have an impact on them. This is something that has been studied, sociologists, psychiatrists, doctors, ... have concluded that this is true.
On the other hand, you have someone who says that an ideology they don't like will lead to the ruin of the society. At the same time, communities, and often whole countries themselves, don't see the problem with these ideologies, and the catastrophe that this person has predicted does not occur. The only reason they claim that is because they are intolerant and want to impose their ideology, not because they want what's good for others.
So, yes, there are __some__ subjectivity. The same way that there is subjectivity around "good and bad" and yet "murdering" is universally considered as "bad" but "not going to the catholic mass" is not.
Neither of your examples would be considered murder by those doing them. In the case of slavery you can’t murder property.
A murder is specifically an unjustified killing. And as far as I am aware it is universally considered bad. Which makes sense because murder being considered bad is pretty much baked into the definition.
I can’t think of a modern society that does not condemn going into a random person’s house and killing them. Nor any past ones for that matter.
Now in some backwards ass country they might not consider it murder if that random person was homosexual. Or a killing might be justified in the context of a revolution. Or to bring rain. Or when shooting some guy fleeing with your tv in the back.
You realise that it is exactly what I'm talking about: everything is "subjective" if you look close enough, but only an idiot will think everything is therefore on the same plane.
Sure, "murdering" is not "100% always in all circumstances considered 100% bad" (but I still think that "universal" was not a bad choice, the same way "universal healthcare" does not mean there is no illegibility criteria and therefore exceptions). And of course, there is a lot of discussion to even have on what people mean by murder, but that is, again, missing the point.
But that is totally ridiculous to then pretend that it means that "murdering is bad" has therefore as much legitimacy as "touching your nose with the left hand index finger is bad".
The fact that is subjective does not mean that you cannot say anything anymore. It feels like a common bias in "technology" people: some of them think they are so smart and are condescending to "social science", and yet they are lost on concepts that social science considers as obvious.
I don't understand the scare quotes: per my previous reply, is a ban not a ban regardless of who does it? Maus has nudity and curse words; that's why it was banned in Tennessee. 1984 has multiple sex scenes - the well-funded Christian publication PluggedIn[0] rates it 18+.
Two things can be true at the same time: a book can be both banned in one place, and used to promote someone's brand in another. Somebody in a deeply repressive and abusive home will not have a better or worse life if Dua Lipa did not exist.
In Europe every kid over 13 would buy both with no issues at all. 1984's sex scenes are so-so and something that just happens in the background like nothing.
> one of them is not appropriate for elementary schools because it includes essays debating which sexual acts are appropriate for feminists to perform and other adult topics. Why is it "authoritarianism" to say that a book like that doesn't belong in my kids' school library?
Who exactly are you to say what is or isn't appropriate for elementary school libraries?
It's authoritarian because it's about people with authority (parents, teachers), telling people without (students) what kinds of media they are and aren't allowed to consume, which is about controlling which ideas they're allowed to think about. You don't like children thinking or learning about sex, but there is no moral or rational reason for that. You just don't like it, and you wish to use your authority to impose your preferences on people who have no power to stop you. That's authoritarian.
And no, I don't think parents should be able to control their children's media diets, the idea that parents get to control their children is itself authoritarian. You don't own your kids.
You should think this through. The logical endpoint is that all age based content restrictions are "authoritarian".
So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
That type of media was never in schools to begin with. The problem here is that schools and districts made their own, informed curation decisions, and those decisions are being overridden by zealous parents informed only by their religious and political persuasions.
The implication here is that schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it? As many on the left would say: "everything is political". So what we're discussing is (yet another) front in the "culture war", this time about what ideas and values children should be exposed to.
The banned books movement (on either side) is broadly not about curriculum. It’s about access in non-required spaces such as libraries and clubs.
The issue there isn’t that kids are being exposed to these items, the issue is that other parents are censoring what _my_ kid can be exposed to. They are infringing on _my_ rights.
Meanwhile I’m not requiring their kid to go into a library and checkout Maya Angelou.
This kind of thing happens commonly with language development over time. If a word or phrase picks up a strong connotation, then the word or phrase stops being used generically. This used to happen so slowly that nobody really noticed it happening to individual words or phrases, I think.
As an example, starting a fire could be called “firing”. If you say you’re going to “fire the stove”, that isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant. If you call your friend group a “squad”, again, this isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant.
If your friend group goes camping and works together to light a fire, you could say that you’re part of a “firing squad”. But, that already has such a strong connotation that it would be confusing and you would have to constantly explain what you actually mean because “firing squad” as a phrase is already taken.
That is of course a synthetic example but I think it illustrates the point. When we say “banned books”, that has a certain connotation. If what we mean is more like “curated books”, because they aren’t actually banned for sale anywhere, even at the local level, then saying “banned books” is confusing in the same way and it carries an undue emotional charge from the typical usage of that phrase.
If that undue emotional charge seems to be getting weaponized, then using it and acting innocent about it is going to ruffle some feathers.
They are banned though. Not curated. You are not allowed to have these in school libraries. It’s not an editorial decision. For instance the Utah law says that a book must be removed from all libraries if 3 school districts in the state ban it.
No librarian, or teacher, or admin or parent in the other school districts gets any say.
That’s a ban. People may not like that their state is engaging in authoritarian behavior, and it’s less authoritarian than other behaviors, but it’s a ban by the simple facts. Doublespeak doesn’t change that.
I have seen lots of discussions about headlines along the lines of “<state or local government> bans <book X>”. Or just referring to book X as “a banned book in <state or local jurisdiction>”. This has the problem I described, and this is where I see arguments happening that don’t really make sense to me. It isn’t doublespeak to say what I said about this.
If what we’re talking about is actually the more detailed headline “<state or local government> bans <book x> FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES”, or “book X which is banned FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES in <state or local jurisdiction>” then that is accurate and fine. I haven’t seen anyone complaining about this, have you?
We can’t pretend the two are the same thing, they aren’t the same thing.
I think a better frame is: will the children be less socially adjusted if they are exposed to the book?
While "everything is political", I can still see some differences. What was presented as "banned on neutral, apolitical basis base" in the previous comment can be seen as political at some level, but they are way less political than "let's ban this book because I don't want my children to be exposed to lefties ideas".
It feels like there is an order of magnitude less importance to "maintaining our children unexposed to others' point of view" in the cases of left-wing book-banning than in the right-wing side. After all, right-wing book banning often works on "leftie keywords" or themes (gender study stuffs, inclusivity, ...) while I don't think there is a real movement to ban books because they use too much of "right-wing keywords" (free market stuffs, nationalism, ...).
> schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it?
Well, sure, but it's not possible for the religious parent groups to be apolitical either (nor do they make any attempt at even ostensible neutrality). Teachers and administrators are well trained, often have or have had children, and are generally a part of the community where they work and teach. It's not like they are 'coastal elites' making lefty decisions for the community; by and large, they share similar worldviews to the kids and their parents. I think we should give them more of our trust in making these decisions.
> You should think this through. The logical endpoint is that all age based content restrictions are "authoritarian".
I do think that. It's rude to assume that I haven't thought my position through.
> So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
Sure.
> My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
I don't, but I was one, and I accessed all kinds of stuff on the internet that my parents and teachers didn't want me to see. Including gross violence and sex stuff. It didn't kill me. It didn't even hurt me. I'm fine. I'm a better person for having exposed myself to those things than I would be if I'd been sheltered from them.
But now in a vacuum you're advocating from your position (not being a parent) but being a human, that because you turned out ok, that everyone else will. There is no numbers, no statistics, just your anecdote here. Which is ok, but that's why two people immediately called your opinion out as being extreme.
> There is no numbers, no statistics, just your anecdote here. Which is ok, but that's why two people immediately called your opinion out as being extreme.
No one else provided any, either. If you have strong evidence that exposure to media you don't like is bad for your children, please provide it. If you don't have any, my anecdote is better evidence than you've provided.
Two people calling out an opinion as extreme does not make it extreme, and an opinion being extreme does not make it wrong.
> Who exactly are you to say what is or isn't appropriate for elementary school libraries?
parents
If you want to go full anti-authoritarian, you are literally advocating anarchy. One in which you have no right to jail someone for killing someone else.
There are many moral systems! Some of them are based in Christian ethics, which many people prescribe to. In fact it's the one the United States is based on. You can also choose something like liberalism. Many or most people would at least agree that "killing randon people at random times" being advocated in a book is not a good thing. And if that's not a good thing, then there is a moral judgement to be made to "ban" said book. I'm not saying that book exists, but if it did - would you "ban" it?
No one "owns" another person, but there are many other forms of relationships between people that allows for one person to dictate a media diet for another.
Parent-based rights arguments are perfectly adequate for the 80%, but degenerate in some horrific ways for the rest of the population. We need community-level input on how to raise kids so that the leftover 20% don’t just get fucked up by parents that “know best for their kid”.
Anecdotally know of a few times where kids were taught that their molestation was their own fault (both sub-10yo), and had friends whose parents actively pushed them to kill themselves
So that has nothing to do with what I said. Parents, and if 80% of parents are good people, then it makes sense that parents have a say what is in the school library. It also makes sense that if a parent is abusing a child, a teacher will see it.
I don't have a solution for you for all types of families, but this doesn't change that miyoji's take is fairly extreme.
The effective difference is of course that they could easily get that book from somewhere else if they want it.
If I'm prevented from bringing my dog into a restaurant, that doesn't mean that dogs are banned. It means I have to go to the restaurant on the other side of the street.
If McDonald's doesn't serve any hard liquor it doesn't mean that alcohol has been banned in the country.
Is it really that cut and dry? A technically competent person might easily access a book while living in an authoritarian country, while someone who grows up in an authoritarian family in a "free" country might be prevented from reading a book both at home and at the school where their parents lobbied to ban the book. (It's quite hard to access suppressed information if you lack the knowledge it exists in the first place.)
Authoritarian family? Parents have the authority over their children until they are old enough to make their own decisions. It is up to them how they raise their kids.
They will have all the time and opportunity in the world to read and try anything they want to when they're older.
The specific examples I provided included domestic abuse; most sexual abuse is done by a family member. I hope it's not contentious to say that parental control should not be as authoritarian as to allow that, let alone suppress the victim's knowledge of what it is.
Authoritarian is an adjective. A thing can be authoritarian without all things being so. Yes, authoritarian things have always existed, and yes, a powerful religious group joining forces to make sure kids continue to hate themselves for being gay or trans is authoritarian.
Everywhere being authoritarian throughout all time seems a fairly good summary to me?
The Romans nailed Jesus to a cross, the American south bred human slaves, Europe regularly had crusades and pogroms, post-war America supported a crazy number of military dictatorships, the Iron curtain, Communist China and so on.
On the other hand, there is a persistent idea that schools are just making curation decisions for the children in their district, and people are calling that book banning. That's what you seem to be suggesting here. In all cases I'm aware of, that's not what's happening either; it's generally a parent, or a small group of parents, generally all from the same religious group and political party, bullying the library or school district into reversing curation decisions they had already made. A small, vocal group ultimately makes decisions about what all the kids in the district can read at school, based on their own religious and political affiliation. That comes much closer to your "banned book mental association" than I think you give it credit for.
You're more likely to be aware of a library book curation decision where parents are publicly fighting to remove a book the school library management wants to keep; compared to a curation decision where the school library management simply never decides to make a book available to begin with.
Personally, I am OK with the library making their own curation decisions. That's part of how a library functions, I understand that they can't carry everything. I have a problem when zealous parents try to override those decisions, especially when they are motivated by political or religious worldviews.
I think the Bible should be in school libraries (and it always has been), but if you're keeping it while removing other books for sex, violence, genocide, pedophilia, rape, homosexuality, or other objectionable things that are also included in the Bible, I think you're being inconsistent and overzealous.
Do you think the librarians' choice about what books to stock in their library aren't motivated by political or religious worldviews? What kind of person becomes a school librarian? One motivation is that they want to influence what kinds of written information young people do and do not readily have access to.
I've known enough librarians to come to a belief that, in general, their curation decisions are more motivated by a love of books and learning than they are by the more divisive political issues of the day.
Of course, none of us can completely escape our own biases. That said, librarians aren't airdropped in to small towns from San Francisco; generally, they're local. If they're in a religious conservative community, it's pretty darn likely they are also religious and conservative. They have probably also had some education that helped them understand biases and how to practice avoiding them.
I find your implicit suggestion that there is some underground network of Leftys descending on small town America to become librarians and put LGBTQ books on the shelves laughably unserious. If you want to influence kids, go on tiktok or become a youth pastor or something. It's hard enough to get kids to read books they're actually interested in, you're not gonna get far as a librarian.
Is there a valid reason to ban a book? On one hand, I agree there are books which are dangerous. But usually the most dangerous ones are one’s that are more innocuous. I think Catcher in the Rye is dangerous as I have seen grown men misread Holden as a hero to look up to rather than as a flawed mis-socialized man child. On the other hand, I have seen people go too far the other way and say that this book proves that everyone who rejects authority is just a bitter, poorly-socialized man baby. How painfully common these two misreadings provide me reason to ban my children from reading this book outside of my supervision.
However, Catcher in the Rye is banned not primarily for these nuanced misreadings, but instead primarily for its profanity. Meaning if we stripped the profanity out, this dangerous book would likely never have been banned in the first place. When you allow these bureaucratic institutions to ban books, they are not going to Socraticly reason through what should and should not be banned in a rigorous manner. They are going to ban books that vibe against their “sensibilities”.
Given that we do not have philosopher kings making these ban decisions, the least bad option is to not have any ban. Encourage kids to read broadly and get many different perspectives. More importantly, teach them to act as a scouts who should be proud/excited when they find a new opinion other than their own — and even more excited to find an opinion better than their own to adopt — rather than a warrior who is proud that their previous opinion was “right the whole time”. Sometimes your old opinion was proven right by new information, but that should not make you excited/proud. I’m confident that if all children are taught this scout-mindset that solving the intractable problem of banning books “correctly” would be completely unnecessary. Matter of fact, having children build immunity to bad ideas through learning how to be a “good scout” would be strictly better than making little bubble-boys who are safe from bad ideas only because the thin bubble the “philosopher kings” set up for them. The latter bubble makes children’s immune system unprepared for the real world while the scout mindset helps build hyper-capable, curious, and civically engaged adults.
I've banned a number of books from my household as I don't want my child exposed to them. And I support banning them from the school. Children aren't adults. It's reasonable to expect that education caters to a common denominator within society. I would only have a problem if adults couldn't acquire these books.
A family we know got swept up in the "banned books" movement. They repost banned book content on their Instagram and even got T-shirts with witty sayings about supporting banned books.
They bought some books for their kids from a banned books list thinking they were "banned" for thought-control reasons, but opened one up to find an illustrated guide to using mobile phone apps to find partners for anonymous hook-ups and a guide to following through with it.
The book clearly wasn't appropriate for their young children, so they hid it away. Now we joke that they've also banned the book.
It's the school librarian's job to select books. These people are trained in childhood education.
Your imagination has clearly gone way off the deep end here.
Reading that there are gay people doesn't turn people gay. If you think it does, that says more about you, I think.
Trying to hide the existence of gay people from children leads to homophobia from the straight kids, and mental health issues from the gay kids. You are dead wrong here.
So you think parents should not have a say? Wouldn’t that be rather authoritarian to have whatever books and disregard criticism? Many librarians are activists and are choosing books that are not educational. They are actively selecting books that they agree with.
I guess you are fine with the recent increase in homeschooling which is hitting record numbers. The activists..oops "professionals" don't like that either.
People choose to commit atrocities in the name of the famous holy books - you either support banning them as well or concede there's something more to it.
... Wait, are you claiming that people are, having not previously been exposed to Nazism, reading it, and going "well, this seems like a pretty good idea really"? I'm fairly sure that's not a thing. No-one's being radicalised by it; rather the only people who really read it are already radicalised, because, otherwise, why would you bother?
There may be books which radicalise people. But I'm fairly sure Mein Kampf is not one of them.
To a common denominator yes but if you aim for too much breath then you miss out on a lot of good things if you ban until almost everyone is satisfied. And some fads that get popular to ban things I disagree with like when people said violent games were the reason for violence or that rock and metal music made teenagers angry or that grunge makes them kill themselves. Many times some groups latch on to some popular culture topic as the reason for X pre-existing problem of the world.
Note that children do become adults while in (high) school. It's common for book-banners to imply that they are removing books from elementary school kids when they are actually removing them from adults and almost-adults in high schools.
Sure. The place for these adults to get books is the county/city library and not the school library. As I said, there's a certain common denominator that we need to respect when talking about public schools.
Banning and burning books is from an era when there was no digital publishing. Only way of distributing text/thoughts was by printing press. Today we don't burn books but we constantly ban/shadow ban digital content. This is independent of which country you are from. Corporations do the censorship mostly, in place of the governments. Try writing a Reddit comment opposing mainstream politics. You are only allowed to play in a sandbox. AI shadow-burns your comments automatically and blacklists you if you go out of your human guiderails. No human dictators to blame. So yes, if this is a dictator thing (I think it is), we all live in a kind of modern dictatorship.
I think it's a little bit naive to think they ignore the association. They know it perfectly well, which is why they are using it. Same thing with concentration camps, same thing with mentions of Gestapo.
Is it useful to limit these thoughts to a dictator doing dictator stuff, though? What would be the material difference be between that and operatives of his political party astroturfing local school boards to remove books that teach about the racial history of the country or the existance of trans folk, to make it appear as though the local community decided to do it?
Given the track we're on, in 80 years Americans will be extinct and whoever's occupying my current space will be living in the Managed Democracy of Monocolored Benetton.
Their kids will be taught that's all it ever was since the first colony was established in this otherwise-uninhabited land on Stardate 2302.5.
If the school declines to put a book in the library, that's not a ban. If people outside the school with power over the school demand that books be removed, that's a ban.
The groups demanding books be removed are often not even parents of children in the school. It external parties driving this stuff.
What I haven’t seen mentioned in these discussions is where the mental association of “banned books” comes from.
In America, at least, the school curriculum spends a lot of time talking about dictators. It mentions, numerous times over many years of a child’s life, that something dictators often do is to ban books that could make people question them or that could make people support people the dictator doesn’t like, etc. In all such cases covered in the school curriculum, dictators’ “banned books” are not allowed to be sold in the country at all, and are often destroyed, sometimes even in mass burnings.
So, this is the psychological association people typically have with the phrase “banned books”.
The news articles over the past X years declaring something like “Government Y bans books!” seem to be leveraging this mental association to give people the emotional impression that Government Y is doing dictatorships things. I think this is why people get annoyed, since not allowing whatever books in the school library is not a dictator thing (okay dictators do it but it’s like drinking milk or being against animal cruelty, it’s not something that is primarily done by dictators).
So, when people say that not allowing a book in a school library is a type of ban, they are correct, but they ignore this association which most people have from school.