Philistine, n. A person who is hostile or indifferent to culture or the arts, or who has no understanding of them.
The Old Testament is full of stories of what used to be called “heroes,” people who embody a favored characteristic of a culture and perform extraordinary feats of strength or skill. Unlike today, when a “hero” simply means someone who does something someone likes, the term used to be restricted to characters who did something worthy of admiration, whether they were real people or mythic figures. One of the most memorable of these Old Testament stories is that of Samson, who is just the most perfect idiot imaginable. Samson, culture hero of the Israelites, falls in love with Delilah, a Philistine woman. The Philistines and Israelites being mortal enemies, Delilah tries to trick Samson into revealing the source of his strength. Samson gives her all kinds of fake answers, and each time she tries to take his power away, only to have him kill the Philistine men who she uses to try to apprehend him. I can only assume that the authors of Judges had a sense of humor, because for some reason, Samson finally tells Delilah the truth: it is his long hair that gives him his strength. She of course cuts his hair, Samson is arrested, barbarities ensue, and pretty much everyone dies. It’s a great story.
It’s also not the most “child-appropriate,” despite being regularly taught in Sunday School. I don’t remember this, but my mother recently told me that when she first read me this story I began crying hysterically at the part where the Philistines blind Samson after his hair is cut. Apparently, both my mother and father had to assure me that neither of them, nor me, nor my brother would ever be blinded before I would calm down. That’s the risk you run with any story worth telling (and quite a few not worth telling): that someone will hear it and become extremely upset.
Oklahoma is not willing to take that risk, if its Attorney General can be believed. John O’Connor is the twenty-first century definition of a Philistine; like the cowardly and degenerate villains of the Bible, he comes in force for those things that are greater than himself, and seeks to bring blindness in his triumph. O’Connor has a list (what authoritarian worth his salt doesn’t?) of books that he thinks we should consider taking out of public libraries. Several of them are recent books that have caused significant controversy, such as 13 Reasons Why, the Netflix adaptation of which has been reasonably criticized for its romantic and sensational portrayal of a girl’s suicide. As a sidenote, the criticism of that book and subsequent television series occasionally exemplified excellence in media criticism. Suicide has long been known to be essentially contagious; when media reports of suicide are mishandled, they can send the message to struggling people, especially teenagers, that after your death, all your problems will be solved. Your enemies will despair that they ever mistreated you, your friends will keep you in their memories forever, and your life will have been a romantic tale of sorrow. Of course, what really happens is your enemies don’t care, your friends are sad but eventually move on, and your family is distraught. The calls for Netflix et al. to handle suicide in a more careful way were sort of the peak of reasonable criticism, sad as it is to say.
So, we have a politician in a conservative state trying to ban books. Must be Wednesday. I’ve not read most of the books on the list, though some of the ones I haven’t read I do recognize from previous fronts in the culture war. The Hate U Give caused a minor dust-up a while back, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower has a permanent seat on lists like this. Lest you think this list is just full of culture war fodder, other targets include I Know why the Caged Bird Sings, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, and my beloved favorite, Brave New World.
That Aldous Huxley’s brilliant dystopian novel would find disfavor among the type of person who becomes attorney general of Oklahoma is thoroughly unsurprising. The book is not particularly salacious; there are quite a few references to sexuality, though anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that Huxley’s philandering characters are not exactly intended to be arguments for sexual libertinism. Brave New World is part of an unofficial trifecta: that book, along with 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 are what you might call “the dystopia trio.” Orwell’s classic is everyone’s favorite cautionary tale of authoritarianism, while Huxley and Bradbury made more nuanced, and I would argue more accurate, predictions for the future of civil society. Orwell used the Soviet state as a template for a future tyranny, while Huxley and Bradbury posited that we would all essentially enslave ourselves.
Hard to argue with that, given the role of elected officials in all this. In fact, it’s hard to argue with Huxley’s whole thesis; the man must have had a vision of the future before he wrote his prescient novel. Bradbury’s book is more applicable these days to specifically left-wing censorship; the “pleasure to burn” that you see in Fahrenheit 451 has eerie parallels in the ecstatic frenzy of cancellation campaigns, but seems less present in the buttoned-down world of school board nincompoops and political hacks. It’s also strange how Brave New World wound up on this list, though 1984 was spared. I suspect that this is because the villainous Party in Orwell’s vision was explicitly socialist, while Brave New World is more specifically critical of Western consumption and laziness. But it seems that this list isn’t a McCarthyite project, at least insofar as it isn’t a specifically anti-socialist campaign. Apparently, the concern is whether any of these books are “obscene” or “pornographic.” Well, none of the ones I’ve read are, and though Potter Stewart gave us a pretty glib catchphrase about this subject I frankly don’t care about the opinion of any person who would look at either 1984 or Brave New World and see either pornography or obscenity. That said, Brave New World has zero scenes in which a character stares at his sleeping partner and contemplates raping and murdering her, while 1984 has one scene in which that occurs, so I’m not sure this list has even a stupid principle behind it.
We could walk through the legal standard for obscenity, and I could tell you why these books are not obscene by any constitutional definition, but that frankly wouldn’t matter. For one, this is a list of books that the government is looking into keeping out of its own libraries. Oklahoma has never been one to shy away from a project simply because the project is pointless and embarrassing, and it is constitutional for a bunch of rednecks to elect a government that will keep good books out of public libraries. They can’t stop you from owning or reading these books, but they can refuse to make them available in schools. Some would say this isn’t a book “ban,” because they’re not making the books illegal, they’re just not stocking them. Fine, I guess, though the prohibition to librarians that they not stock classic books does smack of a ban. Whether it’s a true ban or just an anemic imitation of a true blacklist, it’s anti-intellectual, and it’s a great example of what happens when you’ve only read the parts of a book that your most hysterical neighbor screeches about.
The problem here isn’t that we’re doing another book ban. We’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again. When I was a kid, it was Harry Potter. At one point, it wasn’t even books, but heavy metal records. These things pop up occasionally, because Philistines aren’t just Biblical bad guys, but our representatives and attorneys general. They’re our neighbors, our cousins, our city councilors and policemen. They’re often the majority. I don’t despair for the kids who will never read Brave New World because most of those kids are either Philistines or will grow up to become Philistines. The ones who want to read books like that will eventually find them, maybe later than high school, but they’ll be unable to avoid that book if they just look around. This is one reason I think that book burning isn’t such a big deal: if it’s your own book, and it’s not, say, a rare copy or something, then fine, who gives a shit? Sure, the Nazis burned books, but the problem was that they were other peoples’ books, and they were burned specifically to make them unavailable. A person who burns a book because he disagrees with it isn’t really doing anything worth getting mad over, unless doing so makes that book actually harder to get a hold of. And the books on this list, a mix of pop trash and deep wisdom, will be almost exactly as available to these kids as before. Chances are, some will actually seek out these books because adults don’t want the kids to read them. Build a censorship regime, and the first thing you’ll figure out is how strongly certain people want to read things you don’t want them to.
No, the problem isn’t the ineffectual, performative banning of books, but the fact that this will keep happening like clockwork as long as we indulge the idea that random idiots get as much a say in the affairs of government as the rest of us. Despite the takes you’ll see on this, these bans aren’t anti-democratic; they’re the perfect example of democracy in action. Enjoy, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Bad Idea Brennan 