Books, bans, and bonfires: Why censorship always backfires
Key topics:
Book bans often boost popularity instead of suppressing ideas
Censorship spans religion, state, and modern sensitivity culture
Historic and modern examples reveal banning as largely ineffective
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By Jonathan Loeb
The pen is mightier than the sword, some say, mostly those who never had to stare down the blade of a combat broadsword. And yet there clearly is something very unsettling, even scary, to the world’s powerful, about the prospect of a free press. For as long as books have been around, some have tried to ban them.
Well-meaning censors love to protect our fragile psyches from the nefarious influence of dangerous words. The religious do it to protect our souls, the state to protect our allegiance, and even voluntary groups now play the ban game, apparently to protect our opinions, or at least ensure we have the right ones. And yet, throughout history, not a single banned volume has ever disappeared. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that books can only be popular on their own steam, but to make them truly legendary, it’s necessary for someone to attempt to ban them.
The earliest reference we can find is in ancient China. The Emperor Shih Huang Ti wanted it said that history began with him, so two years before his death he began to burn every book in his realm, saving only a single copy for his Library. At his death in 210 b.C, 460 Confucian scholars were buried alive with him to ensure no one messes overmuch with that narrative. And yet here we are, writing about him burning books and the works and wisdom of Confucius, on the internet, more than two thousand years later. It should have been a clue to future rulers, but if any of the powerful read that lesson, they failed to take it to heart.
In 8 A.D., Ovid was banished from Rome for writing The Art of Love – and he died in Greece 8 years later. In 1497 the Florentines burned all copies of all his books to make it clear that they, too, had far more sophisticated tastes than his offensive book. It didn’t quite work, and US Customs had to bar it from entering the pristine moral shores of the United States in 1928. And what do you know, you can find copies of The Art of Love by Ovid all around.
In 640 we found the biggest BBQ of words in history – the burning of the legendary Library of Alexandria in Egypt by the Caliph Omar. The destruction was total, the permanent loss of over 200,000 texts. The Caliph declared that if the books of the Greeks agreed with the Book of God they were useless and needed no preservation, and if they disagreed they were pernicious and had to be destroyed. Here we find the exception that proves the rule. The contents of the library was indeed lost for all time. So the books are no longer around. Also not around, however, is Omar’s caliphate… and that might be a lesson to write down somewhere as well.
When the Bible was translated into vernacular languages, there were several attempts to ban those versions. Latin was viewed by some as the only official version, and so English, German, French and all other translations of the Bible are among the earliest works on the banned list. Incidentally, the Bible remains a banned book in several places today. When they can’t burn or ban a work – they censor it. William Shakespeare himself had to tread carefully… Elizabeth I banned a whole scene from Richard II and it was removed from every copy of the play. His King Lear was banned from the stage until 1820, in defence of George III.
So far, we have seen Religion and State object to books – and do-gooders necessarily follow next. Consider Dr. Thomas Bowdler – or more likely his sister Maria - slashing 10% of the bards work to protect us all from anything that could ‘raise a blush on the cheek of modesty.’ Bowdler and his sister are known only to the most informed and discerning of readers, while Shakespeare, back in business as the original and best, remains.
In 1881 we began to see a clue that bans and befuddlements might actually be worse than ineffective, they may actually be counterproductive.
Boston’s District Attorney told Walt Whitman to clean up his novel Leaves of Grass or face banning. He wasn’t kidding, or joking around. He was so serious in fact, that the torrential sales enabled Whitman to buy a house, for cash. James Joyce, in a letter to a publisher, wrote of ‘some very kind person’ who bought every last copy of the first edition of Dubliners and had it burnt.
We might think that it is old fogies behind most burnings and bannings – but this isn’t the case. Consider history’s most notorious book burners – the Nazis. More accurately, the book burners of the Third Reich were the German Student Union – proving that youth and inexperience can also be on the forefront of regression. The list of offensive titles they tried very hard to rid the world of lists some rather familiar, nay, bestselling names: Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, Hellen Keller, Thomas Mann.
Across the continent, moving from the national to the international socialists – Stalin tried his best to purge the minds of the proletariat of prohibited thought. While the New York Times sang the praises of the Soviet Union and intellectuals made fools of themselves praising what amounted to Potemkin villages – Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote down truths that in time no one could deny. Thrown in the Gulag, he would write about the Gulag, and make the term a household word.
While it should by now be clear that banning, altering or burning books is a fool’s game – in 2023 – it seems a lot of people are still playing. On the right and left, the war for the mind continues – and it seems that there are no clear winners other than the books they are desperately trying to ban.
Consider that arch-atheist Richard Dawkins’ bestseller The God Delusion has been downloaded three million times in Saudi Arabia. You can’t legally move a Bible into the territory, but Dawkins sells like hot cakes.
The right has in their sights names that will never go away, with Pastors burning Harry Potter and moral giants activating against Fifty Shades of Grey, Lolita and The Color Purple. The left, Huckleberry Finn, the Bible and 1984. Sometimes both sides converge to really try and squeeze every last drop of life – and a lot of sales revenue – out of the same volume. Penguin Random house – one of the big five publishers – is particularly keen on applying the filter of sensitivity readers to the classics, and to Roald Dahl. Sensitivity Readers are modern day Bowdlers, and they keep highly sensitive souls from being exposed to outdated – or worse, contrary – thought. It makes sense that certain publishers are particularly sensitive to controlling what they publish… after all… Penguin Random House’s parent company Bertelsmann, was once owned by an SS member who wanted his company to be a ‘National Socialist Model Enterprise’. Here we are, just a few decades after the war and this time we’re as protective of minds as ever, but this time, presumably, correctly so.
If there’s a book you hate, an idea you find offensive, triggering or abominable – a casual reading of history will suggest to you that the very last thing you should do to curtail it would be to ban the book you found it in.
Rather, a free marketplace of ideas might yet be our most powerful weapon in creating progress, and countering regression. At least, it seems to work out that way every time you read the book.