I went to high school in a somewhat rural area. Local politics were steered by religion and conservatism. Therefore, it should have come as little surprise that our library’s copy of Catcher in the Rye had been subjected to extensive redaction by some busybody. In fact, entire paragraphs of the book had been blotted out with magic marker. The school librarian wasn’t the least bit surprised or disturbed when I pointed this out to her.
I used to assume that book banning was the province of the Right. That’s no longer the case. Liberalism has bred its own version, and it’s just as reprehensible. In essence, the belief is that people should be sheltered from anything they find unsettling or even distasteful.
Case in point: the whole concept of trigger warnings. The original idea was that victims of trauma shouldn’t be confronted with statements or imagery that might provoke or aggravate emotional shock. It won’t do to make a veteran with severe PTSD sit through a screening of Apocalypse Now or force a rape victim to watch The Accused.
But we’ve now gone far past that. Students in our colleges want Greek mythology and harmless statues removed from the environment because they represent “sexual assault.” The works of William Shakespeare should have warnings about racism and suicide.
It’s gotten to the point that one can refuse to study just about any literature or history if it offends them. They simply have to claim that a given work violates one of a rapidly-expanding list of “triggers,” including legal drug use, skeletons, or “slimy things.”
The counterargument is that it doesn’t constitute censorship because advocates aren’t demanding the removal of such works from the curriculum. They are wrong. It absolutely does. If enough students refuse to read Ovid or Chaucer, professors will remove those works from the program. The effect is the same.
And for what? Are we to believe that a disproportionate percentage of millennials have been subjected to traumas that necessitate this? How are our psych wards not overflowing with affluent suburbanites?
The answer is simple: they haven’t. Political correctness has been taken to its logical extreme. Combine that with a generation of people who’ve been raised to believe that their comfort and sense of fulfillment overrule everything else, and this is what we get.
Is Jenny really unsettled because of David’s penis? Does it inflict the male patriarchy on her? No. But she doesn’t like it, and she’s been raised to whine until she gets what she wants. Combine that with a compulsion towards self-righteous meddling, and the calls come to take the statue down.
There was a time high-school students read Fahrenheit 451. I don’t know if they still do (images of things burning might trigger fears of…something, I suppose). Reilly tells us that the banning of books didn’t start with the government; it was demanded by the people.
We can slap as many pseudointellectual labels on it as we want. This is no different than Southern fundamentalists burning Beatles records. Only the framework for justifying it is different.
We’re meant to learn from history, even when those lessons are unsettling, especially when they’re unsettling. Art is at its best when it forces us out of our comfort zone. If we continue on our current course, we will lose all of that.