McAlister: Good books can point us back in the right direction

Published 6:00 am Friday, August 11, 2023

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” — Ray Bradbury

Richard Cherwitz’s recent piece (“The negative effects of banning books,” Aug. 4) brought to mind one of my favorite short novels, Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (1953).

Therein we encounter a dystopian future in which books are methodically burned, and firefighters start fires rather than put them out. The protagonist, hapless fireman Guy Montag, is resigned to a life of extinguishing private libraries and coming home daily to his shallow, television-addicted wife until he meets a young neighbor whose family reads books and has intelligent conversations.

This changes Montag’s entire perspective. As the novel draws to an apocalyptic close, Montag encounters several people who have committed portions of great literary works to memory in the hope of someday rebuilding civilization.

Cherwitz’s column might have been a useful polemic against the dangers of potential zealotry, but much of it is clouded in mystery. He decries recent attempts at “book banning,” but he nowhere defines the tern and refrains from giving any details of the legislation he deplores. Nor are we given specific titles and authors of books at the center of the tumult.

For the record, the law recently passed by the Texas Legislature, the READER Act, places restrictions on the availability of sexually explicit material in school libraries.

A look at the ALA website, which contains a list of the 13 most “banned” (“challenged” is more accurate) books in 2022, gives us some insight into the problem. Among the titles are “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, a graphic novel which is “graphic” in more ways than one, and “This Book is Gay” by Juno Dawson, which is a sort of gay sex manual.

None of them could be remotely considered classics. This material is hardly suited for cultivating the qualities of “understanding, empathy, and solidarity” which Cherwitz deems important. Such books more likely encourage nihilism and narcissism. As to public school curriculums, the more time is spent obsessing over sexual orientation and gender identity, the less opportunity students have to be exposed to great works like those of Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne and many others that have shaped our civilization, including the Bible.

Cherwitz discusses the concept of “self-risk,” in which one “at least momentarily must stand inside the shoes of their interlocutors and temporarily view the world as they do. This is necessarily in order to thoughtfully and logically reflect on the merits and validity of opposing positions from the inside out.”

This has some merit, especially in developing debating skills. One thinks of St. Thomas Aquinas, who developed and laid out the best arguments of positions with which he disagreed before refuting them. But in the current context, “self-risk” has its limitations.

Do junior high students in the typical public school have the ability to separate wheat from chaff when it comes to explicit materials? Empathy does not seem to be a virtue of books which are pornographic in nature. And to doubt everything in Cartesian fashion may do more harm than good.

A few final thoughts come to mind. Censorship and “book banning” have been routinely characterized as a sin found exclusively on the right side of the political spectrum. But “cancel culture” has been heavily dominated by progressives.

A case in point is Amazon’s refusal to sell Ryan T. Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally” and similar books which challenge transgenderism.

A larger problem is that many of our youth are so addicted to screens that they find it difficult to reason and think clearly about what is real and unreal, what is true and what is false.

Bad books like “Gender Queer” only reinforce our moral and cultural illiteracy, while good books, as Bradbury has shown, can hopefully point us back in the right direction.