More thoughts on Dr. Seuss, offensive art, and an open society
First, foremost, and (in my opinion) leastmost, everyone is within their rights here. The Geisel family can stop printing these books, eBay can stop selling them, we can complain, others can critique us, eBay and the Geisel family can ignore us, platforms can host our complaints anyway, etc. etc. So everyone is within their rights.
But rights are boring. “I have the right!” is only the beginning of an analysis of what one should do. It merely means that the law is not an obstacle here. Great. Lots of things are lawful, so which lawful action will you pick?
Some of these works are probably unsuitable for children. (But I think a strong case can be made for keeping Mcelligot’s Pool in circulation for kids.) So what? Lots of books are unsuitable for kids. That just means they aren’t put in the kids’ section. These books are of great historical and cultural significance. There are plenty of good reasons for adults to read and buy them. If those reasons don’t add up to sufficient sales for further print runs, well, so be it. But I would like to live in a world where those print runs are canceled for the old school reason of low sales, not as a PR move.
A society in which you get better PR by printing fewer books is an unhealthy society! I truly believe that there is no such thing as a dangerous book, only a book that we did not properly learn from. The most vile book in the world can be a great lesson on the darkness of the human heart in the past and present. Those of us who value tolerance disregard racist books at our peril; far better to study the enemies of tolerance, and study their tools. If I can choose between reading a good book, learning from a bad book, or calling for an end to publication of a bad book, I’ll never pick the last option.
So my beef is with the culture, not with the Geisel family. Hell, even eBay was being economically rational here, which is arguably a positive comment on their management but a very negative comment on society.
And the eBay thing is worse. Stipulate whatever you need to stipulate about books and kids, but what is wrong with adults buying these books from each other? Are these books really worse than the other things sold on eBay? Again, eBay has every right to not sell these books but sell far worse ones. Nonetheless, it is sad that we have a culture in which many people see their move as a positive one. eBay is willing to sell the Turner Diaries, Mein Kampf, and numerous other books written by vile people propagating vile notions, yet they will not sell books that, for all their flaws, still contain far more good than bad, and deserve to be studied as an example of how the good and the bad are mixed.
Worst of all, I hear rumblings of librarians arguing over whether these books should remain on the shelf. If the fight is over whether to move from the children’s section to adult, well, so be it. But I understand that some woke librarians want them gone, period. I doubt that all libraries will pull them, but some will. And that isn’t good. We shouldn’t want a society where we see pulling books from shelves as the way you solve social problems. Books need to be pulled in a world finite shelf space and constantly appearing new books, but that process should not be overseen by people who think Tipper Gore, Lynne Cheney, and Jesse Helms were on the right track. It never goes anywhere good.
One place it leads us to is a world where access to the most controversial art and literature has to happen through specialty archives and research libraries. Such facilities will (quite reasonably) prioritize affiliated scholars over the general public, since they are employed by scholarly institutions. But all of us should be able to examine and learn from artifacts of human shortcoming. Here’s a possible solution for those copyright holders who don’t want to profit from works they consider beyond the pale, but do see some value in keeping the works out: Surrender their copyrights. Release the work into the public domain. They will no longer have to get their hands dirty by profiting off of offensive works, but the world can still learn from those works.
Finally, to show where I’m coming from, I’m teaching a banned book this fall. Galileo’s Dialogues. It was banned because he claimed for himself the right to offer a take that contradicts someone else’s biblical interpretation, and because he argued that others could likewise use reason and conscience to decide these matters rather than deferring to authorities. So I’m pretty knee-jerk when people say that a book is too dangerous for the mass market.
