Unintentioned

I’m in between fiction projects just now. Oh, I never don’t have any, but I run through cycles wherein some sense of completion gives me permission to take a pause. I’m in one of those now. I’ve been cleaning my office, a never ending task that seems to begin again even before it’s finished. Much like writing.

So I’m writing…something. A bit of a ramble, but we’ll see if it leads to anything.

Recently I heard Emily Drabinski, president of the American Library Association, discuss the problem with book bans and the assault on libraries coming from the Right. There are two components to this assault that I can define (in the broadest terms): parents who have become seriously concerned with what their children are reading and right wing groups fueling the assault on liberalism in general provoking those parents. The absurdities one hears at school board meetings and public hearings about library policy suggest that a predetermined set of ideas are in play which have little to do with “protecting children” and everything to do with enforcing social conformity.

On one level, this is nothing knew. People in this country (and no doubt elsewhere in the world) have always taken issue with certain books, messages, presentations…with Art, frankly, because any art that’s worth a damn is challenging. And many people do not like to be challenged, especially in those parts of their lives where they feel they have the right to be autocratic. Parenting, for example. Telling a parent to back off and let the child grapple with things that cause the parent discomfort is a fraught practice. I know where I come down on this issue, but then…I’m not a parent.

But I am a son. From that end of the relationship, I can speak to this issue. But more than that I am a citizen, a member of a community, and insofar as we have to live with each we have certain expectations about how that should proceed, and I am with John Green when he says he supports public education and all that liberal freedom of access stuff because he doesn’t want to live in a community of stupid people. Those kinds of choices affect us all. We’re seeing the consequences of the opposite view now, with all the nonsense about vaccines and the discrediting of expertise and the assault on libraries. Which is my way of saying that anyone who tells me I have no stake in this fight because I have no children is spouting nonsense.

Recently I was on a panel at our local SF convention about book banning. I made an observation that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Especially pertaining to those who fuel this stuff and goad people into mouthing off about things they—if you listen to them long enough—know nothing about. Because—shock—most of them do not read the books they’re trying to ban. The aforementioned Ms Drabinski recently won a defamation suit against a man who accused her of, basically, grooming kids and teaching them about, among other things, anal sex. He lost the suit. He owed her a dollar and public apology. He admitted he had misrepresented her.

What I said at the panel was, this has nothing to do with the books themselves, that basically this is pathology, a social movement that has collected members eager to exercise rage in lieu of reason. They don’t read the books in question. They either see what’s on the cover or they obtain a list from somewhere or someone, probably online, but who knows, maybe from meetings where they get fed a line and sent out to wreak holy havoc, because…well, at best because they think they have no control. At worst because they’re neurotic and have allowed their neuroses to evolve into a pathologic condition.

Which is what makes this so frustrating. Anecdotal evidence is always suspect, but in the last fifty years (give or take) I have lost count of the times I’ve interacted with people who expressed disdain for certain books and films who, upon pressing the issue, admitted they had not read or seen them. Personally, I have zero respect for this kind of thing. Speaking for myself, when I am presented with a book or movie I’m not interested in, that’s the extent of my reaction—that’s not my kind of thing. Even then, I never recommend banning anything, because…

The “it should go without saying” aspect sometimes makes it difficult to explain, but I do believe a great deal of questionable material is to an extent culture-specific. But beyond that—or before it—most bad art is just that: bad. In that, it is not well made, it fails in any way to offer quality, it repulses on several levels including banality, mediocrity, and just lack of anything worth saying. The worst thing people can do is to feed it attention. But even that, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Someone in the world may find it worthwhile. 

That is subject for debate, a debate that has been going on since art existed. Consider: we praise “classical” periods of art and marvel at the quantity of superb works, amazed at the wealth of talent which, by inference, seems lacking today. The fact is, for the most part only the Good Stuff survived. The unknown amount of crap disappeared over time, leaving us with this impression that everyone was a genius.

I exaggerate a bit, perhaps, but not by much I think. Sturgeon’s Law, as historical process—ninety percent of everything is crap.

I am not here defending bad art. What I am doing is condemning Group Think and the arbitrariness of social conformists. Here’s something to consider: conformity happens. No one has to police it, it is an emergent property of people living together. Certainly the details can be  influenced, but it’s not something one can predict with any confidence. But people generally want to belong, they want to feel part of a community, and if left to their own devices they will find their own ways to fit in. It happens.

I bring this up to point to the unintended consequences of these artificial movements like Mothers For Liberty, which is an umbrella organization for attempted social engineering, result in countermovements no one can anticipate with any certainty, but which also affect aspects of community that no one could foresee. The attempt to assuage the shocked sensibilities of people with a host of irreconcilable biases can erupt into chaos in communities not initially targeted.

Unless, of course, they were. 

The across-the-board attack on DEI is a consequence of people who don’t read books trying to get books removed from access.

By now it should be obvious that all this angst about DEI has nothing to do with benefiting our communities. Frankly, that “purge” of DEI has done nothing but hamper communities. The assumption is that privileging minorities in order to get them places where they have been traditionally underrepresented has been to the detriment of qualified white people—white men, I should say—and as a result, things do not work as well as they should because less qualified marginalized people are trying to do jobs for which they are unsuited. The reality has been that everything is harder because too many qualified people have been removed from positions they were filling quite well to make room for white males who…have not actually appeared, for the most part. And those who have are no better qualified and in many instances are less qualified. The entire convulsion was spurred by assumptions that, honestly, no one would have bought into if they had been better informed or just less frantic. To be as clear as I can be, these people don’t read. Many won’t, some can’t, but the controversy over literacy has created a chasm between understanding and anxiety which is costing us dearly.

The books book banners want banned are all about so-called minorities having a voice. 

This is not brain surgery. (I mean, in a way it is, but you know what I’m saying.) The assault on books, on education, on knowledge itself is intended to create a populace too ill-equipped to defend itself against being duped. A better read, more educated public simply doesn’t spend the way an illiterate public does. The better-read, more educated public also expects accountability that matters—environmentally, socially, economically. This also is an emergent property.

Which brings me to what I really wanted to talk about, which is…childlessness. 

We do not have kids. Never wanted them. Speaking just for myself, there was a brief period in my youth when the idea flitted about my head, but by the time I was 25 or so, it was gone. I did not want to be a parent.

That brief period was due mainly to unexamined assumptions about what life expected of me. It was simply a given that one grew up, met a special someone, and procreated. For a time I saw that as a syncretic whole. Probably like most people. It’s how things are. 

I slipped past it unattached and came to a place where all those assumptions came one by one in for questioning. I had already broken with traditional faith-based “givens” and left all formalized religion behind. Along with that came a long stretch of looking at everything else attached to that.

But in the end it came down to two factors, which ultimately turned on one of them. The first one had to do with suitability. I came to understand that parenting was not something I had any great drive to embrace. The second had to do with what I wanted from life. Reproducing meant very little me. My interests, my drives lay in other directions. Ultimately, it meant writing. Pursuing that would have left precious little time to parent. 

And I wasn’t willing to give that up.

Which meant, in my estimation, that I would have shortchanged any kids. I might have been a perfectly fine parent, but I would have resented it. Not a good choice. And frankly, too many people were urging me to do exactly that—be a parent—for reasons that had nothing to do with my well-being and pretty much everything to do with their sense of Ought To Be. Conformity. As far as I can tell, the only thing I’ve missed out on is the whole conversational mish-mash over the problems and challenges of childrearing. That and a lifetime of having limited options for everything else.

I was fortunate in finding a partner who felt pretty much the same. But I was prepared to move on if that had turned out to be a serious issue.

Which brings me finally to the whole question of who gets a say in what goes into education and whether we should ban books. To say to someone like me that because I have no kids I should have no say in these matters is a serious misunderstanding of what communities are all about. Though she was ridiculed for it when she said it, Hillary Clinton was right when she said it take a village to raise a child. It does. All of us are in some way part of a child’s gestalt. Because all of us are members of that village every child has to learn to live in.

Also, we were all children once. I would have resented it to my core if some group of adults had deprived me of all the components of learning the world because they didn’t like what was on the cover of a book. Such people are not, in my opinion, concerned with teaching children how to live in the community—they’re concerned with forcing the community to make them comfortable. Now, everyone has a say in how to make their community better and beneficial, but expecting to be safe from ideas that make them uneasy is not healthy. Not for them and certainly not for the community. 

Yes, some ideas are unhealthy. But you don’t deal with them by hiding from them. And you certainly don’t learn which ones are genuinely harmful by trying to get everyone else to ignore or hide from them. 

Books are probably the safest, most effective way to deal with the ocean of ideas we must swim in ever invented. Learning is the only advantage we have in dealing with a world that can both enrich and impoverish us, that can show us wonder (if we learn how to look) and kill us (especially when we don’t pay attention). Banning books is a cowardly way of pretending reality is entirely a matter of having a good credit score and the right skin color.

But as I said, it’s a pathology.