The new book Banning Books in America: Not a How-To is shocking in one important way. It admits that books aren’t banned anymore, and that if anyone does want to ban them it’s usually liberals.
For the most part, Banned Books, a collection of essays edited by Samuel Cohen, a professor of English at the University of Missouri, takes the standard liberal line that banning books is a conservative pastime. In his introduction, Cohen laments “that some of those in power have benefitted and even encouraged division and demonization.” He claims that “the entire nation is now seeing the violence a society can do to its most vulnerable members—people whose sexuality, gender, race, and economic condition make them vulnerable in a society riddled with bigotry and selfishness—and to anyone who wants to live in a just society.”
Furthermore, Cohen’s list of banned books is books that aren’t banned — in fact, some are hugely popular: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.
Cohen himself admits that none of these books are banned. “Before you object that there are no real book bans, at least not anymore, at least not in the U.S.: OK, fine. Then this is a book about attempts by people to keep other people from reading books by curtailing their access to them in one way or another. Admittedly, these ways generally fall short of outright government bans of the books’ very existence: they include removing them from classrooms, from school library shelves, from public library shelves, but laws banning their existence are rare and, historically in the U.S., are overturned in court.”
So where lies the danger of censorship? According to two of the essays in Banned Books, the book censors are on the Left.
In her essay “The Woodcutters,” the novelist Lydia Millet notes that “in the wake of leftist cancellations, so-called sensitivity readers have begun to be hired as a mechanism for reassuring a publishing corporation that a piece of writing does not risk the giving of offense to a predetermined set of readers. This paternalistic screening is manifestly also a form of censorship, for censors are censors whether their motivations are noble or base. Censorship is an act, not an intention or feeling.”
Millet then dismantles “trigger warnings” that tell readers a sensitive topic may be discussed: “What a trigger warning presumes is that readers are entitled to be protected before the fact from the possibility of powerful emotion, an odd entitlement at best and one that is seldom afforded to any being in the course of the rest of life. The implication is that art should be a safe space, divested of surprise or shock, into which folk can enter with the polite reassurance that their daily journey through the world will not be substantially disrupted. This is a direct undermining of the idea of art.”
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Amen. The most interesting essay in Banned Books is “Reading ‘Howl’ Across the Iron Curtain, or Why Our Cold War Ideas About Banned Books May No Longer Be Helping” by Brian K. Goodman. Good addresses the actual book censorship that went on during the Cold War under communism. Goodman offers a fascinating history of the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg and its connection to attempts by Czechoslovakia to free itself from Soviet rule during the Cold War. The Prague Spring of 1968 called for free expression and “socialism with a human face.” It was crushed after a month by Soviet tanks.
Yet Goodman can’t help himself, equating this atrocity with the American conservatives in the 1990s trying to “censor” rap music, offensive art, and pornography on television. Like so many critics, Goodman equates the age-old concept of a “red light” district with censorship. Conservatives never wanted things such as music banned — it was Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore, who headed the Parents Music Resource Center — but rather sensible barriers to entry. The government shouldn’t pay for art that offends the people paying for it. If you want to look at salacious stuff, let’s just have sensible restrictions to protect children.
As for books, the only ones I’ve heard being censored are conservative volumes such as Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally.