Banning books, and the power of the printed word

Perhaps unique in the animal kingdom is humans’ ability to interpret tiny marks on clay tablets, stone, papyrus, paper, or some other material — and now on tiny screens. The ability not only to absorb the meaning of those tiny marks, but to respond to them emotionally, and to think about them.

I wish scientists had the means to follow the pathways in our brains that lead from understanding what we have read to experiencing sorrow, or anger, or fear, or glee. Or the pathways that lead to any one of myriad thoughts, so that instantly we are able to connect what we have read to our memories of our own experiences or those of others, or to our knowledge of history, or perhaps to reminders of childhood dreams, or people who went out of their way to help us, or to the sudden realization that we have forgotten to buy milk.

And fortunately for our growing understanding of everything, sometimes those marks lead to monumental or paradigm-shifting insights and discoveries.

Those tiny marks can awaken us to both the huge cultural differences that separate people, and the significantly different ways in which humans conduct their daily lives, on the one hand.

And, on the other hand, they reveal to us the many characteristics that all humans share. They can awaken us to the cruelties that humans have inflicted on one another through the ages, and to the injustices that contribute to glaring inequalities.

They can awaken us to the complexity of individuals. Inform us of people’s efforts to improve the lives of others. And reinforce our belief in the goodness of most of our fellow humans.

The people currently hell-bent on banning books know how powerful those little marks can be, but their focus seems to be solely on what they imagine or fear (or pretend to fear) printed words — that is, a book — might spur a young person to do, or act upon. They want us to believe that if a young person reads about gay characters (“Lawn Boy,” by Thomas Evison; or “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” by Alison Bechtel), or about a child raised by same-sex parents (“Heather Has Two Mommies,” by Lesléa Newman; or “And Tango Makes Three,” a nonfiction picture book about a baby penguin raised by two male penguins, by Justin Richardson), that reader will immediately identify with homosexuals.

They want us to believe that young people who read about consensual sexual intercourse between characters in a novel (as in Judy Blume’s “Forever” or Kashuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”) are in imminent danger of becoming promiscuous.

They want us to believe that reading about the discriminatory and sometimes monstrous treatment of people of color in the United States (as in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee; or “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison; or “The Hate U Give,” by Angie Thomas; or “Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism, and You,” by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds) will make white children hate themselves, or hate all white people. Or even hate the United States.

They want us to believe that reading a book in which characters behave violently (as in “Maus,” by Art Spiegelman; or “The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini; or “Half of a Yellow Sun,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) will spur young people to take up arms.

According to BooksRated — self-described as “a non-commercial, international research data and analytics group” — from 2017 until mid-May 2023, “book bans in the U.S. have affected 5,906 unique titles.” The books named above are among them. But how much evidence is there for the existence of the cause-and-effect outcomes book banners claim?

Virtually none, except for anecdotal accounts concerning a tiny number of young people, although even in those cases, the direct link between one book or several books and significant changes in any individual reader’s behavior or sense of self is impossible to determine. And almost without exception, other factors led those individuals to do whatever they did.

It seems increasingly obvious that the ulterior motives of many of those book banners are to reinforce or increase the divisions between one group and another in our society, to depict liberals and progressives as immoral or worse — people who would kill full-term babies, or who look the other way or even promote pedophilia and other deviant behavior. And to whitewash history, by promulgating the lies that the Founding Fathers intended Christianity to be our national religion, and that slaves thrived and were treated kindly before the Civil War.

The book banners want us to forget about or ignore the crucial role that books play in widening and deepening our understanding of ourselves and others and the world around us, thereby contributing to our humanity — our humaneness and benevolence.