[Ed. note: This is the first installment in my second (of two) weekly features, Your Mileage May Vary. Basically I get to rant and ramble for about 1,000 words on the topic of my choice.]
If this anecdote doesn't make you foam at the mouth, then I'm not sure I want to know you:
I just completed courses to become a library director. In these courses we were strongly encouraged to "weed" out all books and materials that had older publication dates than 2000. We were told not to worry about not having any of the "classics" on hand because patrons could always use the inter-library loan system to borrow them from somewhere else.
Recently, I have had quite a few patrons requesting different books such as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Screwtape Letters" and other classics and I was unable to fulfill their request because libraries either do not have them or are unwilling to loan them out anymore.
argle bargle RAWR rawr rawr.
One thing that makes us humans different from the animals is our ability to understand, record and store abstract data. We don't just care about finding food and mates, the whos, whens, wheres and hows; we care about the whys. We are, to put it bluntly, privy to a dimension that exists above the purely physical; we are a combination of the temporal and eternal. To quote C.S. Lewis, it's incorrect to say that we have souls. We are souls; we have bodies. Forgetting or ignoring that fact is a step down a very dangerous, very dark path. What does this have to do with the upkeep of the local public library? Frankly, everything.
Knowledge is power; the pen is mightier than the sword; we’ve all heard these cliches, but they’re overused and worn out for a reason: They’re absolutely true. There is a reason our Founders enshrined freedom of speech as a right protected from government intrusion; namely, the free exchange of ideas is essential to a prosperous and healthy society. But more important than that is training the minds of the population to use those ideas, to understand what is being spoken. Without this skill, there’s no point to storing information – why keep a product on the shelves if no one wants it?
The hard part, of course, is to get the population into a state of intellectual laziness without them realizing what’s happening. You can’t come at it headlong, telling people outright that they’re not allowed to think. People are stubborn. (Nothing says “Come on in!” quite like a “Keep Out” sign.) But if you can trick the population; if you can convince them to come along because it was their idea; well, then you’re cooking.
Ray Bradbury’s “Farenheit 451” is often held up as an example of the dangers of censorship, but in reality it’s about the dangers of complacency and cheap, easy entertainment. Beatty’s monologue early in the book, where he explains the history of book burning to Montag, makes this plain: Books cause problems because they give people ideas. Ideas bring about disagreements and wars. Everything goes much more smoothly when ideas aren’t in the picture, so the powers that be removed the books and replaced them with television and radio, a constant stream of images and sounds that eliminate the need for all that pesky thinking. “Brave New World” has similar themes, as does “1984” and pretty much any other distopic work you’d care to name.
These works have, however, a shared problem: They portray the process as overt, the deliberate work of human hands and minds, a conspiracy of powerful men in back rooms and pressed suits who are fully aware of what they’re doing and why.
I think that misses the mark.
I believe in God; therefore I believe in Satan. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ; I believe in the ultimate struggle for every human soul. And I believe that the conspiracy outlined above is real; but it is not of human work. If we humans are a mix of the profane and the divine; if we are a cross between dust and spirit; if we have the capacity to rise above our mortal flesh; then what better way to destroy us than to convince us that mortal flesh is all there is? What better way to send a soul to hell than to tempt it there with promises of easy life? And what better way to do that than to keep that soul forever a child, forever immature, forever lapping up the sugared gruel set before it instead of going out and hunting meat? And what better way to do that, I ask you, than to keep it from thinking?
A sure sign, played out throughout history, of a society’s decline is that it willingly ignores the past. Note that I don’t say forget; it’s vaguely aware of its history and that of its neighbors. It just doesn’t think that history is worth any attention. And when history is ignored, so are its lessons; so are the ideas, the Whys, the things that set us apart from all the other animals. Sure, we still have our ingenuity, our capacity for abstract thought, our intelligence – but they either go unused or used for infernal purposes.
My concern about the state of our libraries is not, at its root, for the libraries themselves. It is for what they and their state represent. A well-kept library represents the desire of a community to better itself, to attain knowledge, to learn from the past. The library’s contents show that community’s interests and areas of study. Therefore, culling older materials is an alarming sign, not just because of the loss of available knowledge but because it shows, and I mean this without hyperbole, a point lost on the cosmic scoreboard. Keep the human creature an undeveloped infant, and there’s no telling what can be done while it’s occupied with some mindless diversion. Keep the general population in Condition White, and they’ll hum merrily down the path to their own demise, none the wiser until their iPod batteries run out and they look around and ask, “What happened?”
What didn’t happen; that would be the better question.
Anyway, that’s what I think. Your mileage may vary.
