Are Liberal, Conservative Bans Equal?

By Robin Bates | Published: February 6, 2022

Monday

Since I’ve been writing a lot recently about rightwing book bans, it’s only fair that I should look at liberals doing something similar. I have in mind a school system in Washington State booting Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird from the required curriculum. The comparisons are revealing but so are the contrasts.

Crosscut reporter Venice Buhain has the story:

The Mukilteo School District recently approved removing the text as a required assignment for ninth graders. Under the change, the district retains the book as an option for teachers who still want to assign it. Three teachers at Kamiak High School made the request in the fall to remove Lee’s iconic novel from the required ninth grade curriculum, said Monica Chandler, the district’s director of curriculum and professional development, told Crosscut in an interview before the school board approved the proposal. The book will not be not banned, however, and teachers may still choose to assign the book in their classrooms.

The attacks on Lee’s classic are not unlike rightwing attacks on their favorite targets. Critics highlight certain aspects of a work as potentially damaging to young people and those stand in for the whole work. Here’s what the Mukilteo critics had to say:

The teachers’ objections to the book included criticism that Black characters are not fully realized and that the book romanticizes the idea of a “white savior.” 

The teachers also cited concerns that characters in the book frequently use the N-word while no character explains that the slur is derogatory, and that the word and the portrayal of Black characters cause harm to students of color.

In other words, these teachers are worried about literature that makes students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” I’m quoting from the new Florida guidelines that are being promoted by Donald Trump wannabe Gov. Ron DeSantis. A friend wrote last week that

that kind of statement is straight from the playbook of the left, with their trigger warnings and wokeness.  You can’t decry the old canon for all those reasons and then cry “no fair” when they shoot the same (silly) language back at you. 

I agree and think that the Mukilteo teachers went about their criticism the wrong way. Rather than seeking out ways that the book has certain white blindnesses—which it does, as I’ve pointed out myself—they should just have said that there are better books out there. Curriculums have to pick and choose which books they teach and a novel like, say, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye is far superior. Flannery O’Connor delivered the most devastating critique of Mockingbird when it appeared, observing, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.” In other words, she regards it as a fairy tale. 

 It’s not a bad fairy tale, with wondrous characters like Scout and Jem and a gripping plot. That it has engaged so many readers over the decades (Oprah Winfrey is a huge fan) should not be dismissed. But as a fairy tale, it sugarcoats the depth of southern racism and, for that matter, classism (note its handling of poor whites). Harper Lee is no Toni Morrison or, for that matter, Flannery O’Connor.

But if teachers want to take advantage of how Mockingbird engages readers, they can supplement it with its sequel, Go Set a Watchman. Mockingbird is set in the Great Depression, and by the time the Civil Rights Movement rolls around, the white upper class can no longer maintain its fairy tale illusions. Calpurnia, no longer content with the good mammy role, has quit the Finch household. Atticus, meanwhile, is freaked out that African Americans are no longer treating him with the deference they once did and has joined the White Citizens’ Council. (In Mockingbird, he has contempt for the KKK, which attracts poor whites; the WCC is an upper class version of the Klan.) Scout, as a white liberal born to privilege but awakened to Black anger, must renegotiate her relationship to the south and to her (no longer) saintly father. It’s a perfect drama for teens as they step out of their family cocoons and start to think for themselves.

In a New York Times column, Vietnamese-American author Nguyen complained that parents underestimate their kids’ resilience when it comes to the books they read (read my post on the essay here). Liberal parents can be just as guilty of this as conservative parents. It’s as though both sides regard children as delicate flowers that must be raised in a hothouse environment or they will be irrevocably damaged. The fact, however,  is that we’re constantly reading material that is insensitive in one way or another. The answer is not to forbid it but to address the controversy.

And that’s where right and left differ. The left is not pulling books off of school library shelves or encouraging parents to snitch on teachers or passing laws banning certain content. It is not forbidding teachers from teaching Maus (as a Tennessee school district 90 minutes to east of me did) or throwing Harry Potter and Twilight into bonfires (as a Tennessee church 90 minutes to the north did). In the Mukilteo School District, teachers still have the option of teaching Mockingbird.

Which is to say that the school system appears to regard them as professionals who are in the best position to figure out what their students need. Leftwing wokeness and liberal cancelation pale in comparison to the authoritarian right’s book attacks.

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Leave Your Nets, Bring Your Hearts

By Robin Bates | Published: February 5, 2022
Raphael, Miraculous Catch of Fish (1515)

Spiritual Sunday

Today I share a poem by my favorite poet when I was growing up. As a romantic teen, I was enthralled by three Alfred Noyes poems in particular: “The Highwayman”(which I had memorized), “Song of Sherwood,” and “The Barrel-Organ.” (Less romantically, I also got a kick out of “When Daddy Fell into the Pond.”)

Noyes’s “Fisher of Men” alludes to today’s Gospel reading (Luke 5:1-11):

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

“The blind welter of war” in “Fishers of Men” refers to World War I, which must have been underway when the poem was written. According to his Wikipedia biography, Noyes was a pacifist who opposed the Boer War and also wrote a long anti-war poem in 1913, hoping to stave off the meaningless slaughter that was to come. (Poetry can do only so much.) He supported the allies in the two world wars, however, believing that, “when threatened by an aggressive and unreasoning enemy, a nation could not but fight.” His “fight for right and not for might” can be read in that context.

Fishers of Men

    Long, long ago He said,
    He who could wake the dead,
        And walk upon the sea–
        “Come, follow Me.

    “Leave your brown nets and bring
    Only your hearts to sing,
        Only your souls to pray,
        Rise, come away.

    “Shake out your spirit-sails,
    And brave those wilder gales,
        And I will make you then
        Fishers of men.”

    Was this, then, what He meant?
    Was this His high intent,
        After two thousand years
        Of blood and tears?

    God help us, if we fight
    For right, and not for might.
        God help us if we seek
        To shield the weak.

    Then, though His heaven be far
    From this blind welter of war,
        He’ll bless us, on the sea
        From Calvary.

Added Note – To give you a sense of what Noyes means by “blood and tears”—he foresaw only too clearly the horrors of World War I—here’s an excerpt from his 1913 anti-war poem The Wine Press:

Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!
The cold machines whirred on.
And strange things crawled amongst the wheat
With entrails dragging round their feet,
And over the foul red shambles
A fearful sunlight shone….

The maxims cracked like cattle-whips
Above the struggling hordes.
They rolled and plunged and writhed like snakes
In the trampled wheat and the blackthorn brakes,
And the lightnings leapt among them
Like clashing crimson swords.

The rifles flogged their wallowing herds,
Flogged them down to die.
Down the the slain the slayers lay,
And the shrapnel thrashed them into clay,
And tossed their limbs like tattered birds
Thro’ a red volcanic sky.

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LGBTQ Books under Fire

By Robin Bates | Published: February 3, 2022
Some of the most challenged and banned LGBTQ books

Friday

A recent NBC new story has captured, in a particularly effective way, the effect that Texas’s new book ban is having on young people. Often we talk about these book bans in an abstract way, but reporter Mike Hixenbaugh interviewed a 17-year-old queer student in the city of Katy about the impact on her personally:

From a secluded spot in her high school library, a 17-year-old girl spoke softly into her cellphone, worried that someone might overhear her say the things she’d hidden from her parents for years. They don’t know she’s queer, the student told a reporter, and given their past comments about homosexuality’s being a sin, she’s long feared they would learn her secret if they saw what she reads in the library.

That space, with its endless rows of books about characters from all sorts of backgrounds, has been her “safe haven,” she said — one of the few places where she feels completely free to be herself.

Hixenbaugh reports that some of the student’s favorite books “have been vanishing from the shelves of Katy Independent School District libraries the past few months”: 

Gone: Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts), a book she’d read last year about a gay teenager who isn’t shy about discussing his adventurous sex life. Also banished: The Handsome Girl and Her Beautiful Boy, All Boys Aren’t Blue and Lawnboy — all coming-of-age stories that prominently feature LGBTQ characters and passages about sex. Some titles were removed after parents formally complained, but others were quietly banned by the district without official reviews.

The student told Hixenbaugh, “As I’ve struggled with my own identity as a queer person, it’s been really, really important to me that I have access to these books,” adding, “You should be able to see yourself reflected on the page.”

So what are parents afraid of? Do they think that, by reading such books, their straight children will become queer? Or do they want those of their children who are repressing “a certain tendency” (to use the euphemism used in Oscar Wilde’s trial”) to keep repressing it and fear they might stop doing so once they encounter these works.

Or here’s a third possibility, expressed by Vietnamese-American author Vien Thanh Nguyen, whom I wrote about yesterday. Sometimes such parents

see danger in empathy. This appeared to be the fear that led a Texas school district to cancel the appearance of the graphic novelist Jerry Craft and pull his books temporarily from library shelves last fall. In Mr. Craft’s Newbery Medal-winning book, New Kid, and its sequel, Black middle-schoolers navigate social and academic life at a private school where there are very few students of color. “The books don’t come out and say we want white children to feel like oppressors, but that is absolutely what they will do,” the parent who started the petition to cancel Mr. Craft’s event said. (Mr. Craft’s invitation for a virtual visit was rescheduled and his books were reinstated soon after.)

Examining the parent’s comments, Nguyen concludes that what makes the “sweet, shy, comics-loving” protagonist of New Kid so dangerous to white parents is his “relatability”:

The historian and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed argued on Twitter that parents who object to books such as New Kid “know their kids will do this instinctively. They don’t want to give them the opportunity to do that.”

Nguyen continues,

Those who ban books seem to want to circumscribe empathy, reserving it for a limited circle closer to the kind of people they perceive themselves to be. Against this narrowing of empathy, I believe in the possibility and necessity of expanding empathy — and the essential role that books such as New Kid play in that. If it’s possible to hate and fear those we have never met, then it’s possible to love those we have never met. Both options, hate and love, have political consequences, which is why some seek to expand our access to books and others to limit them.

If this is true, then parents of the queer teen interviewed by NBC may not only fear that their kids will come out after reading LGBTQ fiction and memoirs. It’s that they might start accepting them LGBTQ folk as fellow human beings rather than as abominations. They might leave their parents’ hatreds behind.

Grim as these book bans are, there are a few signs of hope. When I applied Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to the situation last week (Nguyen also cites the work), I mentioned the old professor’s lament that he did not do more to stand up against the book censors. It so happens that book lovers have started fighting back against rightwing ban efforts. Another NBC story reports the efforts in another Texas community, Round Rock, which is 20 miles outside of Texas. When the local school district debated whether to removed Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You from the curriculum–the book is a youth adaptation of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the 2016 national book award for nonfiction–thousands of parents, teachers and community members signed a petition calling on the district’s board of trustees to keep the book on school shelves:

One way the parents association did this was organizing groups such as ACT (Anti-racists Coming Together)to speak out in support of diverse literature at a local school board meeting. 

“Taking away that book would have completely whitewashed history, and that’s not what we are for,” Ashley Walker, 33, one of more than 400 members of the Round Rock Black Parents Association, said. 

The district’s trustees eventually decided to keep the book, so chalk one up for progressive counter-pressure. The forces of reaction and intolerance don’t always win out.

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Let Kids Read Politically Incorrect Books

By Robin Bates | Published: February 2, 2022
Emile Munier, child Reading to Cat

Thursday

 My dear friend the Rev. Sue Schmidt alerted me to a recent New York Times  article about uncomfortable books, written by Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen. At a time when Republican legislators and school boards are demanding that books that discomfit students be removed from libraries and school curricula, Nguyen points out that some of the most life-changing books are those that challenge us.

In his case, one such book was Larry Heinemann’s Vietnam novel Close Quarters (1974), which he read when he was 12 or 13 and which appalled at him with its depiction of American racism. Nguyen summarizes the plot and notes his reaction at the time:

Mr. Heinemann, a combat veteran of the war in Vietnam, wrote about a nice, average American man who goes to war and becomes a remorseless killer. In the book’s climax, the protagonist and other nice, average American soldiers gang-rape a Vietnamese prostitute they call Claymore Face. As a Vietnamese American teenager, it was horrifying for me to realize that this was how some Americans saw Vietnamese people — and therefore me. I returned the book to the library, hating both it and Mr. Heinemann.

And then:

Here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t complain to the library or petition the librarians to take the book off the shelves. Nor did my parents. It didn’t cross my mind that we should ban “Close Quarters” or any of the many other books, movies and TV shows in which racist and sexist depictions of Vietnamese and other Asian people appear.

Later, when writing his own novel about the war, Nguyen revisited the novel that had so impacted him and had a very different reaction. The novel, he realized,

wasn’t endorsing what he depicted. He wanted to show that war brutalized soldiers, as well as the civilians caught in their path. The novel was a damning indictment of American warfare and the racist attitudes held by some nice, average Americans that led to slaughter and rape. Mr. Heinemann revealed America’s heart of darkness. He didn’t offer readers the comfort of a way out by editorializing or sentimentalizing or humanizing Vietnamese people, because in the mind of the book’s narrator and his fellow soldiers, the Vietnamese were not human.

Nguyen then makes a point that I make repeatedly in the book that I’ve just finished writing: books are indeed dangerous. Reading them can be like playing with mental dynamite. Or as Nguygen puts it,

Until “Close Quarters,” I believed stories had the power to save me. That novel taught me that stories also had the power to destroy me. I was driven to become a writer because of the complex power of stories. They are not inert tools of pedagogy. They are mind-changing, world-changing.

Just because they are dangerous, however, does not mean they should be banned or controlled. Nguyen takes a very laissez-faire approach here:

But those who seek to ban books are wrong no matter how dangerous books can be. Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question. A book can open doors and show the possibility of new experiences, even new identities and futures.

And then:

Here’s the thing: If we oppose banning some books, we should oppose banning any book. If our society isn’t strong enough to withstand the weight of difficult or challenging — and even hateful or problematic — ideas, then something must be fixed in our society. Banning books is a shortcut that sends us to the wrong destination.

Nguyen here is not thinking only of the books attacked by rightwing parents and legislators and mentions Huckleberry Finn, which some liberal parents have objected to. He then turns to a series that was very close to my heart when I was growing up, Hergé’s Tintin. My brothers and I loved these books when we were growing up and so did Nguyen and so does his son. Only when they started reading the books together, however, did Nguyen notice

Hergé’s racist and colonialist attitudes…, from the paternalistic depiction of Tintin’s Chinese friend Chang in The Blue Lotus to the Native American warriors wearing headdresses and wielding tomahawks in the 1930s of Tintin in America. Even if I had noticed, I had no one with whom I could talk about these books. My son does. We enjoy the adventures of the boy reporter and his fluffy white dog together, but as we read, I point out the books’ racism against most nonwhite characters, and particularly their atrocious depictions of Black Africans. Would it be better that he not see these images, or is it better that he does?

A word on those depictions of Black Africans. I remember, when I was an eleven-year-old spending a summer in Paris, scouring second-hand bookstores for the one Tintin book we didn’t have. Tintin au Congo is so racist that even in 1962 people had stopped reading it. Belgium, of course, has a terrible history in the Congo and Hergé, while not ignoring bad colonialists, depicts Tintin as a white savior, saving the Congolese, who in the end worship him as a god. While he doesn’t achieve god status in any of the subsequent books, Tintin continues to perform the white savior role.

By pointing out such a fact to his son, Nguyen reports that the two together grapple with complicated issues. Nguyen observes,

 By banning books, we also ban difficult dialogues and disagreements, which children are perfectly capable of having and which are crucial to a democracy. I have told him that he was born in the United States because of a complicated history of French colonialism and American warfare that brought his grandparents and parents to this country. Perhaps we will eventually have less war, less racism, less exploitation if our children can learn how to talk about these things.

And then he adds an important point:

For these conversations to be robust, children have to be interested enough to want to pick up the book in the first place. Children’s literature is increasingly diverse and many books now raise these issues, but some of them are hopelessly ruined by good intentions. I don’t find piousness and pedagogy interesting in art, and neither do children. Hergé’s work is deeply flawed, and yet riveting narratively and aesthetically. I have forgotten all the well-intentioned, moralistic children’s literature that I have read, but I haven’t forgotten Hergé.

Our kids are going to read books that are good for them and books that are bad for them but it’s all part of the process of growing up. As parents and teachers, however, we can at least get them to have conversations about what they have read.

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Our Parents’ Invisible Sacrifices

By Robin Bates | Published: February 1, 2022
Russell Lee, Man on general store porch near Jeanerette, Louisiana (1938)

Wednesday

As Tennessee experiences frigid temperatures (frigid for Tennessee, that is—the twenties are mild for other parts of the country), I’ve been tending to our wood stove and thinking of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” Yesterday I welcomed in “Black History Month” with a series of history poems, but this intimate poem is my favorite lyric by an African American author. While appearing to be a simple account of a father getting up early to tend to a fire, the poem explores a wide range of emotions. The final two lines throw me back in my chair every time I read them:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

One senses it has not been easy to grow up in this household given its “chronic angers.” Perhaps the cold in the house is emotional as well literal, with the boy feeling he must tiptoe around his father to avoid setting off an explosion. The boy certainly has learned to hide his own feelings (he speaks “indifferently”).  There aren’t too many hugs or thank yous here. In fact, none.

And yet this man, beaten down by his work, braves the cold to keep his family warm. Not only that but, in a wonderful small touch, he polishes his son’s church shoes. Looking back, the son is amazed by what his father did for him. When he repeats, “What did I know,” it’s to emphasize how much he overlooked the love that was there. His use of the word “offices” gives these small actions a ceremonial, almost religious feel: love has its rituals that are no less powerful for being austere.

The poem is a testimony to all who serve quietly without drawing attention to themselves. Hayden’s recollection reminds me of Wordsworth mentioning, in Tintern Abbey, those “little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love” that “have no slight or trivial influence on that best portion of a good man’s life.” Hayden’s view is a bit more mixed because these acts are also intertwined with chronic angers. Still, the poem is a wonderful testimony to what parents will do for their children. It is also a thank you, one that comes years later and perhaps even after the parent has died.

Now that he is older, Hayden has learned about love. Thanks to his poem, I think of my tending the fire in the morning as my own act of love for my mother and my wife.

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Black Poetry–Next on the Right’s List?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 31, 2022
Jacob Lawrence, The Library

Tuesday

February as Black History Month has a different feel this year as GOP legislatures around the country hurry to pass laws designed to censor teachers who teach any aspects of American history that make white students (in the words on a Texas legislator) “feel discomfort.” Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, for instance reports on a New Hampshire bill that

would ban the advocacy of any “doctrine” or “theory” promoting a “negative” account of U.S. history, including the notion that the United States was “founded on racism.”

Additionally, the bill describes itself as designed to ensure teachers’ “loyalty,” while prohibiting advocacy of “subversive doctrines.”

Indiana legislators, as they propose their own bills, are also backing them up with “extreme penalties.” Pen America reports,

In addition to HB 1040, two others threaten teachers with termination. Six include a private right of action. And three would punish schools by cutting them off from all state tuition dollars and levying a fine of up to $10,000 per student subject to the violation.

It’s particularly rich that these bills come from a party that refused to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a takeover of the Capitol, that has attempted to undercut investigations of that takeover, and that now simply ignores (when it doesn’t actually applaud) his open admission that he was trying to overturn the election. Perhaps seeing subversive doctrines amongst fellow Republicans has caused them to see subversion everywhere.

I find myself wondering, given all this, how English teachers will be viewed as they teach those many African American poems that deal with America’s uncomfortable racial history. It’s not hard to imagine certain Virginia parents taking advantage of Gov. Younkin’s recent snitch law to report those teaching the following poems in their classes. The first addresses lynching in general, the next two specific racial killings:

Song for a Dark Girl
By Langston Hughes

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree

Way Down South in Dixie
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.

Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till
By Gwendolyn Brooks

(after the murder,
    after the burial)

Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing;
    the tint of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room,
    drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
    And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
    through a red prairie.

Ballad of Birmingham
By Dudley Randall
 (On the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963)

“Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
Aren’t good for a little child.”

“But, mother, I won’t be alone.
Other children will go with me,
And march the streets of Birmingham
To make our country free.”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For I fear those guns will fire.
But you may go to church instead
And sing in the children’s choir.”

She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair,
And bathed rose petal sweet,
And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands,
And white shoes on her feet.

The mother smiled to know her child
Was in the sacred place,
But that smile was the last smile
To come upon her face.

For when she heard the explosion,
Her eyes grew wet and wild.
She raced through the streets of Birmingham
Calling for her child.

She clawed through bits of glass and brick,
Then lifted out a shoe.
“O, here’s the shoe my baby wore,
But, baby, where are you?”

I conclude with a poem that directly addresses the issue of black history itself:

i am accused of tending to the past as if i made it
By Lucille Clifton

i am accused of tending to the past as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother’s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning language everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.

Speaking for myself, I spent much of my childhood being discomfited by all kinds of things. When I learned how to talk about them, they discomfited me less. On the other hand, anything I tried not to see but pushed under assumed a toxic power. The return of the repressed, as Freud called the process.

Repressing our racial history will not help our kids. Or heal our country.

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Liberal Arts vs. Authoritarians: Who Wins?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 31, 2022
Liebermann, Hamburg Convention of Professors

Monday

My friend Rebecca Adams has alerted me to an article, “Opportunity Knocks for Liberal Education,” by political science professor Matthew Moen. A liberal arts education, the author argues, will save us from authoritarianism because it specializes in the two things that counteract it: truth and citizenship formation.

While Moen’s heart is in the right place, I have my doubts about his idealism. About truth and citizenship, here’s what he has to say:

The search for truth is right now the only antidote to the poison of disinformation in America. The creation of virtuous citizens is central to building a new, more inclusive democracy.

Because truth addresses what “ails our nation” and citizenship is “what is required to fix it,” a liberal arts education, he contends, is perfect. The job of liberal arts advocates, therefore, is to be very clear in their messaging: “we just have to effectively convey that to the public.”

There’s an implied criticism of how academe is going about this at the moment.

It will take faculty members and administrators speaking effectively and repeatedly to the public about liberal education — which doesn’t fit easily into anyone’s job description on campus. It will require deliberate outreach to a broad swath of Americans who have come to believe that colleges and universities are primarily places of political indoctrination. Our message needs to be that colleges and universities have always been and will always remain — no matter what else they may do — institutions where students and faculty search for truth in classrooms and labs, in courses as divergent as biology, philosophy and politics.

Instead of getting involved in intricate conversations, the academy, he says, should just be pounding one message over and over:

Hey, America, liberal education teaches students to discern truth and be good citizens, and those are needed to help heal our nation.

I’ve written numerous times about how literature does both. In one column, for instance, I quoted Indian novelist Salman Rushdie describing literature as, essentially, a “no bullshit zone.” The classics, he says, are especially critical these days (he’s writing during the Trump administration) given constant political lying:

[W]hen we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. We can make people agree, in this time of radical disagreement, on the truths of the great constant, which is human nature.

At different times on this blog, I’ve noted that figures like Aristotle, Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Percy Shelley, Frederic Engels, and W.E.B. Du Bois have all held up literature’s truth-telling at its most important aspect, with the last three willing to embrace even authors they politically disagreed with if they told the truth about the human condition.

As for citizenship, I’ve also written several posts about how literature can help forward that end, especially a post on philosopher Nussbaum, who sees a literary education as essential in the formation of responsible voters.

But while I wholeheartedly embrace Moen’s ideals, I question how well this political scientist has really sized up the opposition. Everything he sees as wrong with America he attributes to some vague malaise as opposed to a deliberate neo-fascist strategy. He talks about “a new, more inclusive democracy” as something we should all want (and indeed we should) whereas it’s this very inclusiveness that is under attack. He wants liberal arts discussions that are free of politics whereas rightwing authoritarians see the liberal arts themselves as the problem. In other words, the right has already politicized the liberal arts, characterizing what colleges do as unchristian, anti-white, and socialist.

That’s because, to use Moen’s verb, they see the liberal arts university “indoctrinating” its students when it teaches them to respect difference (including gender, sexual race, ethnic, and class difference); to trust the scientific method; to engage in reasoned discourse; and to follow the truth wherever it takes them. A clear statement of the university’s truth-telling and citizen-forming goals, rather than bringing such people around, will only convince them that the university is the enemy. After all, we’ve seen climate scientists, immunologists, and others being drawn, against their will, into political battles. They’ve found themselves attacked by people who hate the very Enlightenment principles upon which their fields rest.

In short, better messaging is not going to do the trick.

Moen also wants academe to promote “civic/civil education.” While I like the idea, prepare for fierce resistance. If good citizens, as he believes, will engage in reasoned discourse about “voter suppression and intimidation, voter registration, mail-in ballots, election security, judicial intervention, redistricting, gerrymandering, and the Electoral College,” then those who don’t want reasoned discourse on these matters are not going to want good citizens. They’ll do everything in their power to either undermine such education or corrupt it.

So while I agree that we should proclaim the values that Moen embraces, I want us to act as well. We’re going to have to engage in politics, whether it’s over school library collections; history, English, biology and social science curricula; enlightened public policy; or a host of other areas. The liberal arts will either enter the fray or get buried.

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See, This Coal Has Touched Your Lips

By Robin Bates | Published: January 29, 2022
Pauline Baynes, Ramandu in Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Spiritual Sunday

Today’s Old Testament reading puts me in mind of a Narnia episode that has long puzzled me. It’s not an exact match but close enough.

The passage is Jeremiah 1: 9-10:

Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me,

“Now I have put my words in your mouth.
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”

The passage is similar to Isaiah 6: 5-10, which is the one directly connected with the Lewis episode. Isaiah laments that he cannot be a prophet because he is a sinful man, at which point God—or in this case one of God’s angels—again purifies the mouth of one who will prophesy:

“I am doomed, for I am a sinful man. I have filthy lips, and I live among a people with filthy lips. Yet I have seen the King, the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.”

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. He touched my lips with it and said, “See, this coal has touched your lips. Now your guilt is removed, and your sins are forgiven.”

Then I heard the Lord asking, “Whom should I send as a messenger to this people? Who will go for us?”

I said, “Here I am. Send me.”

In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Prince Caspian and his crew have reached “the beginning of the end of the world.” There they meet an old man named Ramandu, who reveals that he was once a star. The man and his daughter sing in the dawn, at which point this happens:

Then something seemed to be flying at them out of the very centre of the rising sun: but of course one couldn’t look steadily in that direction to make sure. But presently the air became full of voices—voices which took up the same song that the Lady and her Father were singing, but in far wilder tones and in a language which no one knew. And soon after that the owners of these voices could be seen. They were birds, large and white, and they came by hundreds and thousands and alighted on everything; on the grass, and the pavement, on the table, on your shoulders, your hands, and your head, till it looked as if heavy snow had fallen. For, like snow, they not only made everything white but blurred and blunted all shapes. But Lucy, looking out from between the wings of the birds that covered her, saw one bird fly to the Old Man with something in its beak that looked like a little fruit, unless it was a little live coal, which it might have been, for it was too bright to look at. And the bird laid it in the Old Man’s mouth.

Later Ramandu explains to Lucy what has happened:

“I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu. “When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to this island. I am not so old now as I was then. Every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from the valleys in the Sun, and each fire-berry takes away a little of my age. And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth’s eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance.”

This vision of becoming a child again arises from Lewis’s deep longing to return to childhood, a longing that resulted in a splendid series of children’s books. Lewis blends that longing with his belief in Christian resurrection, which becomes clear later in Dawn Treader when Aslan appears as a lamb—and a lamb, furthermore, serving a fish breakfast to the mariners (like the resurrected Jesus did to the disciples). In the last book in the Narnia series, Lewis takes his fantasy and merges it with Christian heaven.

For the moment, however, let’s end today’s entry with Lewis’s delightful vision of Old Testament prophets as retired stars who get younger every day.

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Time to Reread Fahrenheit 451

By Robin Bates | Published: January 27, 2022
Texas citizens cart away targeted books from a school library

Friday

The above photograph freezes my blood. It is of men carting away books from a Texas school library  that have been deemed dangerous. I wrote recently about a Texas legislator that who compiled a list of 850 books he found objectionable, and then men appear to be going after them. One wonders whether, in these particular boxes, are to be found

the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s dystopian V For Vendetta, and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

In another book banning story, the Nashville Tennessean reports that the McMinn County School Board has voted 10-0 to remove Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust that won the Pulitzer Prize, from the eighth-grade English language arts curriculum. According to the article, they cited “concerns over ‘rough’ language and a nude drawing of a woman.”

As I noted in Tuesday’s post, this is just the beginning. Just as voter suppression measures spread like wildfire in red states after Trump’s defeat, so we can expect such book bans to become universal throughout the south and parts of the midwest. Which means it’s time to pull out Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Bradbury may have become a Tea Party conservative in his later years, but his novel about book burning was a response to Joseph McCarthy attacks on books. Early in the novel, book-burning fireman Guy Montag, who later will have a change of heart, boasts, “It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”

Later, when he has become enthralled with books, Montag seeks out an old literature professor, who explains, “Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.” I think of how the Trumpian GOP isn’t interested in building, just in tearing down. Burning, as it were.

At one point in the novel, Montag’s boss points out why books are dangerous. He’s not wrong:

What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives….

Bradbury also has words—this time delivered by the old professor—for those who stand by and let censorship happen. After waxing nostalgic for books, the former teacher laments that he did not do more to defend them. The two are looking at a Bible that Montag has saved from the flames:

“Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.” Faber turned the pages. “Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going, a long time back. I said nothing. I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the `guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the, firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it’s too late.”

Montag explains to Faber why books have become a necessity for him:

Nobody listens any more. I can’t talk to the walls [television screens] because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.

In response, the professor tells Montag about a three step process that is very similar to the one I share with my students. The first step is appreciating the quality of what books offer:

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more `literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

And then there are steps two and three:

Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.

Or as I put it, Immerse, Reflect, Act. In fact, just yesterday I told my Sewanee Composition and Literature class that the end point of literature is not interpretation but application. What’s important is how it impacts your life and how it impacts the world.

Rightwing legislators and parents are terrified of young people applying what they read to their lives. Therefore they seek to confine their reading only to literature they think they themselves can control. That the result may be vapid and shallow citizens like those in Fahrenheit 451 is not a problem but the goal.

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