I used to teach a class on the rhetoric of free speech, since what you would think would be very different issues (would the ideal city-state allow citizens to watch dramas, should Milton be allowed to advocate divorce, should people be allowed to criticize a war, should we ban video games) end up argued using the same rhetoric. Everyone is in favor of banning something, and everyone is prone to moral outrage that others want to ban something. The Right Wing Outrage Media went into a frenzy about people trying to pull To Kill a Mockingbird from K-12 curricula, and “cancel culture” as though they were, on principle, opposed to censorship. Those same pundits are now engaged in a disinformation campaign about CRT, which they are trying to ban (or, in other words, “cancel”), as well as books that teach students their rights, mention LGBTQ, talk about systemic racism. And the biggest call for pulling books from curriculum, school, and public libraries is on the part of the GOP, which continues to fling itself around about cancel culture. Of course, those examples could be flipped: people who defended removing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird are now outraged at Maus being removed.
They aren’t the first or only group to claim to be outraged, on principle, about “censorship” at the same moment they’re advancing exactly the policy they’re claiming they are, on principle, outraged that others advocate. Everyone wants some book removed from K-12 curricula, school libraries, public libraries. We are all in favor of banning books.
I’m not saying that everyone is a hypocrite, that there’s not really a controversy, we’re all equally bad, or it’s all about who has the power. I’m saying that this disagreement too often falls into the rhetorical trap that so much public discourse does. We talk as though our actions are grounded in a principle to which we are completely and purely committed when, in fact, we violate it on a regular and strategic basis. It would be useful if we stopped doing that. We should argue about whether these books should be banned, and not about banning books in the abstract.
There are several problems with how we argue about “censorship.” One is that we often conflate boycotting and banning, and they’re different. If you choose not to listen to music that offends you, give money to businesses or individuals who promote values or advocate actions that you believe endanger others, refuse to spend Thanksgiving dinner with a relative who is abusive, that isn’t “cancel culture.” It’s making choices about what you hear, read, or give your money to. Let’s call that boycotting. This post is not about boycotting, but about banning, about restricting what others can hear, read, watch, or learn. For sake of ease, I’ll call that “banning books.”
We’re shouting slogans at one another because we aren’t arguing on the stasis (that is, place) of disagreement. It’s as though we were room-mates and you wanted me to do my dishes immediately, and I wanted to do them once a day, and we tried to settle that disagreement by arguing about whether Kant or Burke had a better understanding of the sublime. We’ll never settle the disagreement if we stay on that stasis. We’ll never settle the issue about whether Ta-Nehisi Coates’ books should be banned from high school libraries if we’re pretending that this is an issue about whether book banning is right or wrong on principle.
The issue of banning books that we’re talking about right now actually has a lot of places of agreement. Everyone agrees that it is appropriate to limit what is taught in K-12, and what public and school libraries make available (especially to children). Everyone agrees that the public should have input on those limits and that availability. Everyone also agrees that it’s appropriate to limit access to material that is likely to mislead children, especially if it is in such a way that they might harm themselves or others. We also agree that mandatory schooling is necessary for a well-functioning democracy.
We disagree about when, how, and why to ban books because we really disagree about deeper issues regarding how democracy functions, what reading does, what constitutes truth, and how people perceive truth. We are not having a political crisis, as much as rhetorical one that is the consequence of an epistemic one.
It makes sense to start my argument with our disagreements about democracy, although the disagreements about democracy aren’t really separable from the disagreements about truth. Briefly, there are many different views as to democracy is supposed to function. I’ll mention only five of the many views: “stealth democracy” (see especially page two; this model is extremely close to what is called “populism” in political science), technocracy, neo-Hobbesianism, relativism, pluralism. And here is my most important point: none of these is peculiar to any place on the political spectrum. Our world is demagogically described as left v. right, just because that sells papers, gets clicks, and mobilizes voters. Our political world is, in fact, much more complicated, and the competing models of democracy exemplify how we aren’t in some false binary of left v. right. Every one of these models has its advocates everywhere on the political spectrum–not evenly distributed, I’ll grant, but they’re there. As long as we try to think about our political issues in terms of whether “the left” or “the right” has it right, we’ll never have useful disagreements on issues like book banning. So, back to the models.
“Stealth democracy” presumes that “the people” really consists of a group with homogeneous views, values, needs, and policy preferences. There isn’t really any disagreement among them as to what should be done; common sense is all one needs to recognize what the right decisions are in any situation, whether judicial, domestic or foreign policy, economic, military, and so on. Expert advice is reliable to the extent that it confirms or helps the perceptions of these “real” people, who rely on “common sense.” This kind of common sense privileges “direct” experience, claiming that “you can just see” what’s true, and what should be done. Experts, in this view, have a tendency to complicate issues unnecessarily and introduce ambiguity and uncertainty to a clear and certain situation.
So, how do advocates of stealth democracy explain disagreement, compromise, bargaining, and the slow processes of policy change? They believe that politicians delay and dither and avoid the obviously correct courses of action in order to protect their jobs, because they’re getting paid by “special interests,” and/or because they’ve spent too much time away from “real” people. They deflect that other citizens disagree with them by characterizing those others as not “real” people, dupes of the politicians, or part of the “special interests.”
In short, there are people who are truly people (us) who have unmediated perception of Truth and whose policies are truly right. We rely on facts, not opinions. In this world, there is no point in listening to other points of view, since those are just opinions, if not outright lies. Just repeat the FACTS (using all caps if necessary) spoken by the pundits who are speaking the truth (and you know it’s the truth without checking their sources, not because you’re gullible, but because true statements fit with other things you believe). Bargaining or negotiating means weakening, corrupting, or damaging the truly right course of action. What we should do is put real people in office who will simply get things done without all the bullshit created by dithering and corrupt others. Dissent from the in-group is not just disloyalty, but dangerous. Stealth democracy valorizes leaders who are “decisive,” confident, anti-intellectual, successful, not particularly well-spoken, impulsive, and passionately (even fanatically) loyal to real people.
People who believe in stealth democracy believe that educating citizens to be good citizens means teaching them to believe that the in-group (the real people) is entirely good, whose judgment is to be trusted.
Technocracy is exactly the same, but with a different sense of who are the people with access to the Truth—in this case, it’s “experts” who have unmediated perception, know the “facts,” whereas everyone else is relying on muddled and biased “opinion.” Believers in technocracy valorize leaders who can speak the specialized language (which might be eugenics, bizspeak, Aristotelian physics, econometrics, neo-realism, Marxism, or so many other discourses), are decisive, and certain of themselves. And technocracy has, oddly enough, exactly the same consequences for thinking about disagreement, public discourse, dissent, and school that stealth democracy does.
In both cases, there is some group that has the truth, and truth can simply be poured into the brains of others—if they haven’t been muddled or corrupted by “special interests.” They agree that taking into consideration various points of view weakens deliberation and taints policies—the right policy is the one that the right group advocates, and it should be enacted in its purest form. They just disagree about what group is right. (In one survey, about the same number of people thought that decisions should be left up to experts as thought decisions should be left up to business leaders, and I think that’s interesting.)
Both models agree that school can make people good citizens by instilling in students the Truths that group knows, while also teaching them either to become members of that group, or to defer to it. Because students should learn to admire, trust, and aspire to be a member of that group, there is no reason to teach students multiple points of view (since all but one would be “opinion” rather than “fact”), skills of argumentation (although teaching students how to shout down wrong-headed people is useful), or any information that makes the right group look bad (such as history about times that group had been wrong, mistaken, unjust, unsuccessful). Education is indoctrination, in an almost literal sense—putting correct doctrine into the students.
I have to repeat that there are advocates of these models all over the political spectrum (although there are very few technocrats these days, they seem to me evenly distributed, and there are many followers of stealth democracy everywhere). In addition, it’s interesting that both of these approaches are, ultimately, authoritarian, although advocates of them don’t see them that way—they think authoritarianism is a system that forces people to do what is not the obviously correct course of action. They both think authoritarianism is when they don’t get their way.
Hobbesianism comes and goes in various forms (Social Darwinism, might makes right, objectivism, “neo-realism,” some forms of Calvinism, what’s often called Machiavellianism). It posits that the world is an amoral place of struggle, and winning is all that matters. If you can break the law and get away with it, good for you. Everyone is trying to screw everyone else over, so the best approach is to get them first—it is a world of struggle, conflict, warfare, and domination. Democracy is just another form of war, in which we can and should use any strategies to enable our faction to win, and, when we win, we should grab all the spoils possible, and use our power to exterminate all other factions. Schooling is, therefore, training for this kind of dog-eat-dog world, either by training students to be fighters for one faction, or by allowing and encouraging bullying and domination among students. The curriculum and so on are designed to promote the power and prestige of whatever faction has the political control to force their views on others. There is no Truth other than what power enables a group to insist is true. As with the other models, taking other points of view seriously just muddies the water, weakens the will, and, with various other metaphors, worsens the outcome. People who ascribe to this model like to quote Goering: “History is written by the victors.”
I’m including relativism simply because it’s a hobgoblin. I’ve known about five actual relativists in my life, or maybe zero, depending on how you define it. “Relativist” is the term people commonly use for others (only one of the people I knew called themselves relativists) who say that there is no truth, all positions are equally valid, and we should never judge others. In fact, relativists are very judgmental about people who are not relativist (I have more than once heard some version of, “Being judgmental is WRONG!”), and they generally stop being relativist very fast when confronted with someone who believes that people like them should be exterminated or harmed.
Stealth democrats and Hobbesians are often effectively sloppy moral relativists, in that they believe that the morality of an action depends on whether it’s done by an in-group member (stealth democracy) or is successful (Hobbesians). But they also, in my experience, both condemn relativism, because they don’t see themselves as relativists, as much as people who are so good in one way that they have moral license to behave in ways that they fling themselves around like a bad ballet dancer if engaged in by an out-group. On Moral Grounds.
Pluralism assumes that any nation is constituted by people with genuinely different needs, values, priorities, policy preferences, experiences. Therefore, there is no one obviously correct policy, about which all sensible people agree. Since sensible and informed people disagree, we should look for an optimal policy, a goal that will involve deliberation and negotiation. The optimal policy isn’t one that everyone likes—in fact, it’s probably no one’s preferred policy—but neither is it an amalgamation of what every individual wanted. It’s a good enough policy. Considering various points of view improves policy deliberation, but not because all points of view are equally valid, or there is no truth, or we are hopelessly lost in a world of opinion. Some advocates of pluralism believe that there is a truth, but that compromise is part of being an adult; some believe in a long arc of justice, and that compromises are necessary; some believe that truth is not something any one human or group has a monopoly on; some believe that the truth is that we disagree; some people believe that, for now, we see as through a glass darkly, but we can still strive to see as much and as clearly as possible, and that requires including others who, because they’re different, are part of a larger us. The foot is not a hand, the eye is not an ear, but they are all equally important parts of the body. We thrive as a body because the parts are different.
So, how does pluralism keep from slipping into relativism? It doesn’t say that all beliefs are equally valid, but that all people, actions, and policies are held to the same standards of validity—the ones to which we hold ourselves. We treat others as we want to be treated. We don’t give ourselves moral license.
And, now, finally, back to the question of book banning.
We all want to restrict books from schools and libraries. We disagree about which books because we disagree about which democracy we want to have. Do we believe that giving students accurate information about slavery, segregation, the GI Bill, housing practices and laws will make them better citizens, or do we believe that patriotism requires lying to them about those facts? Or, at least, pretending they didn’t happen? Do we imagine that a book transmits its message to readers, so that a het student reading a book that describes a gay relationship in a positive way might be turned gay?[1] Do we believe that citizens should be trained to believe that only one point of view is correct, to manage disagreement productively, to listen to others, to refuse to judge, to value triumph over everything, or any of the many other options? When we say books will harm students, what harm are we imagining? Are we worried about normalizing racism because that violates the pluralist model, normalizing queer sexualities because that violates the stealth democracy model, having students hear about events like the Ludlow Massacre since that troubles the Hobbesian model?
We don’t have a disagreement about books. We have a disagreement about democracy.
[1] One of the contributing factors to my being denied tenure was that I taught a book that enraged someone on the tenure and promotion committee. I didn’t actually like the book, and was using it to show how a bad argument works. He assumed you only taught books that had arguments you wanted your students to adopt. In other words, he and I were operating from different models of reading. One topic I haven’t been able to cover in this already too long post is about lay theories of reading in book banning. My colleague Paul Corrigan is working on this issue, and I hope he publishes something soon.