Time to Bring Back Book Banning

The other night on PBS there was a documentary on post-Soviet Russian families. A father, speaking to someone offscreen, said that his children don’t read much because there’s no interest in books any more. I didn’t see what happened after that but I inferred that when the father was younger, when the hammer and sickle smashed and hacked at liberty, reading some books was a dangerous idea.

Maybe it’s a good idea to resurrect book banning. This is why: I’ll only be on this earth for a finite number of years — probably a few hundred. Part of that time is being spent reading, and since time is scarce I had better make my reading hours count for something. With the Internet I can know of and have access to almost any book in existence. There’s a lot to sift through so I need to have some way to know what I should probably read, and it would make the search a heck of a lot easier if someone (the government), somewhere (where I live) told me I’m not supposed to read it under threat of force.

I dislike didactic fiction but I don’t mind offending the state apparatus. There’s plenty of ways an author can offend the state while entertaining; an author’s task is to construct imaginative scenarios in which some people know some things and others don’t anyways, so why not take it a step further into reality and smuggle some dangerous liberty under the nose of bureaucrats? It doesn’t have to sparkle on its chest, it just has to suck the blood out of Bella Bureaucrat. By owning private property embodied in the physical book you’re already one step there. Just go with the flow.

I’m looking at you, Christian writers, mostly. Let’s put aside the eschatological Revelation rewrites and the back-patting, self-help redundancy. And while we can lobby back and forth whether or not it’s okay to have our protagonist say “goddamn”, there’s plenty of other things we can address. The whole breadth of scripture is awfully unapproving of government ubiquity, those thrones and dominions of the earth with the monopoly on coercion. The church — except when it falls in love with the state — works on covenant, not by entrapment. It offers salvation as it’s asked. It’s not enforced, whereas the state is defined by force. In the end, we know who loses, and you don’t even need to be a minarchist to believe that. What happened along the way to make the church forget this tradition?

So I’m casting my vote for banning books — any books, really. And make the consequences dire, but I need a government to do it. Any chump with a clubhouse following can come up with and issue a list of banned books on his website, and everyone else will laugh and sip their teas anyway. Too, this whole thing about reading books that aren’t banned anymore doesn’t count. It’s smacks of Dandies foraging for scraps for fashion. Take the stupid button off and get burned alive, 451-style…at least you’ll know you read something worthwhile while you were alive.