Monday, September 06, 2010

SEPTEMBER IS BANNED BOOK MONTH

Because printed bound books are a commodity in a way that ebooks are not -- that is, solid objects -- they are made more or less valuable by scarcity. The scarcity can be produced in several ways: limited editions, controlled access (must be acquired from a certain shop, like MAC products), increased desire to acquire (popularity, status indicators), destruction of unsold or remaindered copies, and high population density. Do I need examples of each? What the contemporary publishers are panicking over is NOT that the books are no longer objects, but the secondary phenomenon: electronic access to books cannot be limited or controlled except by imposed gateways. Even then, they are easily pirated, as the music controllers know.

I want to discuss censorship. There are many kinds and degrees, but all limit access. First the most obvious: book burning. Authorities like the church or the state gather up material the community considers bad for them (obscenity leads to disorder) and burns it. When I was working at animal control, we had a pathology-tissue-level incinerator, the kind used to cremate bodies to ash. The sheriff brought out impounded marijuana, hard drugs, and pornography to burn there. (We were technically a part of the sheriff’s office.) It took a very long time to burn the porn because the attendants felt obligated to read it all before they burned it. Just in case someone had left valuable documents in there by mistake. Actually, there were often bullets included in the drugs because the purveyors knew about the burning, so one wanted to read at a safe distance.

Authorities routinely censor accurate directions to bomb-making, or floorplans of sensitive emplacements, or lists of undercover agents or protected witnesses, so the advent of the Internet has been very much an advantage to terrorists and criminals. This means that the government feels justified in using very harsh measures of suppression, though information always trumps force. Of course, it is always a temptation to censor in the interest of preserving one’s own interests, so authorities often abuse their power. And if censorship itself is valued, keeping a constant war simmering is a good excuse.

More effective is probably socially enforced self-censorship, saying to yourself, “Oh, I’d better not say that or I’ll get into trouble.” This varies from not cussing where your mom can hear, to not portraying certain acts, to not revealing government secrets. The curb may be defined by outside forces (your mother) or it may be developed from within for practical, rational, emotional or ethical reasons. (I try not to say things that will get me punched in the nose.) And since no two people share the same opinion, there will always be those who want to publish information like how to commit suicide while others want to suppress that, believing that if people don’t know how, they won’t do it. There are also people who filter information at the point of intake from authority figures because they believe they are being lied to or that the source is stupid or contaminated. Tattletales find that their transmission of forbidden information become less and less valuable as it becomes more and more contaminated by previous inaccuracy.

Some authority figures will go to the suppression of the actual individuals: why burn the books when you can burn writers? But if you can’t, there are prisons for people like de Sade or Russian dissenters or semi-criminal men of color in the US. Under imprisonment and torture, information becomes increasingly valuable but distorted. Prison rumors may be worth a lot of cigarettes or maybe not. Rivals who do not have the power to imprison each other may resort to social stigma, which can cut off sales, resources, and connections.

During the Native Amerian Literature Renaissance, some people tried to limit the number of NA writers by attacking their tribal credentials. In the end this furor over who was in and who was out made short term gains for some people and long term loss for the whole category. It was too contentious and irrational for anyone to want to mess with it anymore. The whole concept died except for a few persistent outliers. Anyway, the category was ignored by the sort of smart aleck urban self-defined intellectuals who run internet social websites like Wikipedia. They knew nothing about Indians and did not attract those who did (like Indians), so ignorance is also a form of self-censorship, usually unconscious in the now famous phrase of “not knowing what they don’t know” or even that there might be significant things worth knowing visible to others.

Making a whole category of ideas suddenly visible, like scientific knowledge, is bound to escalate efforts at censorship. Religious authorities don’t want anyone to know that the earth goes around the sun, we walked on the moon, or that safe abortion is possible. The self-censorship of morality has had to hustle (so to speak) to catch up. Preserving the comfort of ignorance has become more difficult.

There is another issue here. Remember Jack Nicholson bellowing, “You can’t handle the truth!” Our insistence that we CAN handle the truth and we want transparency is not really demonstrable. Many people nowadays have closed down sources of information via avoidance (newspapers, certain TV channels, some books) because they become so distressed by the death, destruction, injustice, chaos, and suffering on every hand. They do not have the stamina to handle the subject matter by either confronting it or resolving it in their own minds, much less by taking action. Anyway, it’s so much more comforting to believe lies about Obama’s citizenship than to believe a skinny black man with an elite education and a gorgeous black wife can an effective president. To keep from believing that, some people will destroy the country. Even if they have to do it by banning books.

The most efficient means of banning books is to stigmatize a whole category of authors/subjects: street people, rape victims, Mormons, sex workers -- which will result in a backlash making these books more attractive so that people who seem to fit the category find it easier to sell a book. But society objects to this so much that people who speak for the stigmatized may be punished more severely than the authentic excluded person, who has no access to a voice anyway. Censorship, stigmatizing and shunning may be a way to separate people in a group (as the scribes and pharisees did) from people outside the group (criminals and sex workers, whom Jesus included) in order to guarantee loyalty by preventing anyone from learning about the outsiders. Known people become human and likable. Buy only books that "people like us" read. Which can make individuals even more curious about what the outsiders read.

Banning, stigmatizing, shunning and so on make books more valuable in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. It is amoral strategy regardless of what the goal is purported to be. The motives for such strategies are a whole different story.

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