Weekend reads: The freedom to read

A Q&A on book banning with Toronto author Ira Wells

Today marks the kick-off of Freedom to Read week — and I can think of no better way to celebrate than by diving into a timely new title. In On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy, the University of Toronto’s Ira Wells unpacks the rise of a new censoriousness that spans left and right. He argues that the phenomenon stems in part from technocratic elites’ failures, including forever wars and trade policies that have destroyed communities and accelerated economic inequality, and a cultural climate characterized by “one long linguistic emergency, a state of exception requiring an exceptional response.”

This new censoriousness, he writes, threatens collective intellectual freedom as well individual growth: “It would prevent you from becoming the person you want to be.”

Those of us who care about open inquiry must mount a principled defence, Wells argues, and we must be thoughtful about it. “I’m not making some nostalgic argument that we need to go back to the glory days of free expression,” he tells me, in an interview taped earlier this month. “Those glory days never existed. But it would be a mistake to then delegitimize the ideal of free speech and say that we should stop even aspiring to the ideal itself. Once we give up on that ideal, we’re in big trouble.”

Here, in this edited and condensed Q&A, Wells and I mull over library purges on both sides of the political spectrum — and how those who love books might respond.

TH: On Book Banning begins in 2022, at a meeting over a proposed book purge at your children’s elementary school library. The school’s principal reflects that its books are “too Eurocentric, too male, too heteronormative.” She says she wishes she could get rid of all the old books. Describe that moment for us.

IW: There was an email that went out to all the parents saying that the school was undertaking a library audit. I thought that was a very unusual phrase. We’d been hearing a lot about the book banning controversies that had erupted in Florida, and reading about these acrimonious school board meetings that were going on for hours, where parents were worried about LGBTQ indoctrination. You were hearing about books by Toni Morrison being banned and all kinds of LGBTQ books being banned. Book banning was very much in the air. PEN America, the free speech organization, had been tracking this for a while. When I heard that this library audit was happening, it made me wonder: Is this the guise under which book banning is going to arrive in Ontario?

I remember the principal in the meeting that you mentioned. She was showing us a book. I think the small committee of parent volunteers were somewhat nonplussed, or confused, as to why she was paging through this children’s picture book. It became clear that the book featured a family, and that the family was a heterosexual family, and that the characters were white. This was what prompted the principal to say, with some exasperation, that the library was full of this stuff and she wished she could just get rid of all the old books.

TH: Focusing your own book on school libraries — especially elementary school libraries — makes for difficult work. Of all the free speech areas, school libraries are particularly hard to navigate, given that young minds are impressionable and there’s legitimate concerns about that. And also about age-appropriate material, which you acknowledge in the book. How did you work through those tensions?

IW: I think it’s important to start with definitions, understanding what censorship is, what book banning is. Age-appropriate is also an inherently contested category, because parents will disagree on what age-appropriate is. What I try to do in the book is to start with definitions that come from places like the Ontario School Library Association. They define censorship as “the removal, suppression, or restricted circulation” of materials “because they are morally or otherwise objectionable.” They add that “while the selector seeks reasons to include material in the collection, the censor seeks reasons to exclude material.” I think that is quite clear-cut. It also indicates that when you are finding something objectionable in a text (regardless of what you’re finding objectionable) and your decision is to pull it from shelves, that is what censorship is — by definition. That is the Ontario School Library Association’s own definition of censorship.

Now, they refuse to acknowledge that that’s what’s happening in the Peel region. Peel undertook what they call a “weeding” process. I would emphasize that they say that this is weeding rather than banning. But that is, again, a misrepresentation of library protocol. The American Library Association says that “while weeding is essential to the collection development process, it should not be used as a deselection tool for controversial materials.” Book weeding is when books are falling apart, when books are outdated. These are the kinds of reasons why we weed collections. We do not weed collections to get rid of the stuff that we don’t like. And that is exactly what was happening in this case.

TH: You write about a new censorship consensus that spans left and right. There are Ontario progressives using an Equity Toolkit to weed books from different eras. And there are Florida parental rights advocates opposed to critical race theory and some LGBTQ books. In your view, what do these impulses have in common?

IW: I’m really struck by the fact that these two groups — evangelical fundamentalists in Florida and progressive liberals in Ontario — appear to be polar opposites in terms of their political viewpoints, their ideology, what they believe. But what unites them is this vision of the book as a source of contagion, or the library as a source of contagion, a source of harm. That if the children read the wrong thing, that is going to directly impact their psychological development. It is going to turn them into the wrong sort of people. It’s going to damage them. It’s going to harm them.

I think this is the idea that needs to be confronted. Both the Florida fundamentalists and the Ontario progressives are calling upon books to prove their moral value. [They both think] that what makes them valuable, as literature, is to be of use to their political cause.

That is the wrong way to think about literature. It’s the wrong way to think about books. We shouldn’t be reducing books to their political content, whether they are for our side or for the other side. Again, this is censorship — regardless of whether you think it’s for the right cause or not.

TH: It’s a relief to hear you say that — and say it so plainly. For those of us who love books, I think this is an important moment to say it … I recently went to see Nadine Strossen speak. She is one of my free speech heroes. You quote her in your book. She was at the University of Toronto, at an event sponsored by the Institute for Liberal Studies. She talked about the importance of the principle of viewpoint neutrality, among other things. One of the things that I find troubling about the current speech climate is that the left only cares about the left’s books and the right only cares about the right’s books — and we can’t seem to find a way to care about each other’s books. What I’m getting from your writing is that those of us who care about free speech have to be really principled. If we defend access to the book Gender Queer, for instance, we have to also defend access to Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage. Am I reading you right on that?

IW: Yes, you are reading me right. I think it’s a counterintuitive idea that you would want to encourage speech that you disagree with. This doesn’t come naturally to people. Children don’t naturally [think] it’s important that people issuing opposing viewpoints — things we find disagreeable and wrong and offensive — should be able to do that. But the important thing to remind ourselves is that it’s not only about giving others the right to say things that we disagree with it, it’s about giving ourselves the right to hear it. Giving ourselves the opportunity to think through things, to reacquaint ourselves with our own beliefs, to remind ourselves of why we believe the things that we do.

One of the many thinkers I’ve drawn from in the book is John Milton, and his insights from over 400 years ago. People may think: Why is Milton relevant? But one of his insights is that moral categories are always relational. Which is to say that we recognize good not only for what good is, but also because it’s not evil. If you could imagine that applied to a library, if you were to simply liquidate the library of everything that you defined as evil — whatever that was within your moral parameters — as soon as people no longer have a choice, it becomes enforced virtue, which is not virtue. People have to have a choice. People have to be able to remind themselves of why they believe what they believe, and be able to think through the strongest arguments in opposition to themselves. This is crucial for deliberation within a liberal society.

TH: And sometimes we’re wrong.

IW: Absolutely, we’re very often wrong. But if we cut ourselves off from the opposing viewpoints, we’ll ensure that we’re wrong more often than not.

TH: Another thing that your book helped me to understand is the slippery slope-nature of book banning. Readers may feel more sympathy for parental rights activists in the South, or they may feel more sympathy for progressive parents in Ontario. Many may feel each’s intentions are likely good. But when you start looking at where these lists go — again, on both sides — it swiftly gets ridiculous. One side says you can’t read Margaret Atwood. The other says The Diary of Anne Frank or Sherman Alexi’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It seems like there is no such thing as a little bit of censorship.

IW: That is the really tough thing. I also believe that free speech absolutism is an untenable position, in the sense that we don’t want actual hardcore pornography in our children’s schools — of course we don’t want that. And of course we have to be able to make nuanced decisions about what age-appropriate material is. Again, parents will disagree on those things, and we need some mechanism for evaluating that. But we have to be able to have those conversations.

My off-the-cuff theory is that once you accept the idea that literature is just propaganda — that it’s just politics for one side or the other — it makes it very easy to start using your particular tool kit, or your rubric, to start going through these libraries and just boiling away all that is imaginative, the essence of these texts, all the reasons why kids love engaging with imaginative literature. And thinking about books [instead] as levers of social engineering: “We want to create a better society, however we imagine a better society, and the way that we’re going to do that is by including more of these books, or taking away those books.”

We think about school libraries as these laboratories for creating a better society. That’s inimical to thinking about literature as literature. I think it will ultimately turn kids off of reading. It turns reading itself into this “eat your vegetables” and “become a better person by reading this book” exercise, which I think completely misses why many children read.

TH: I review books, and there was a couple of years there where so many of the books that got sent to me were identity-based. It got very, very tedious. By the same token, I saw the Matt Walsh documentary, “Am I Racist?” and found it heavy-handed and polemical and kind of boring. I want to read a paragraph, now, from your book:

“Throughout history, book banners have sought to deprive readers of specific information, which is anti-democratic. But they would also restrict your personal choices about what to read, which is illiberal. If being a citizen in a liberal democracy means anything, it entails autonomy of mind: We are free to choose how to educate ourselves, how to think and what to think about, and what to read. These choices are profoundly personal. Our reading reflects the quality of consciousness we hope to cultivate, the nature of wisdom to which we aspire, the mental lives we choose to lead. This is what makes book banning so deeply offensive: It represents an attack on your intellectual autonomy, your right to determine the future of your own mind. It would prevent you from becoming the person you want to be.”

That is so powerful. For so many of us, we became the people we are through reading— through that process of learning, and growing, and changing. You dedicate this book to your children. What reading culture would you like to see evolve for them?

IW: I think that has to come from within them. It’s not for me to say, it’s not for me to dictate. I hope that they will go through many phases and love many different kinds of books. And I think it’s so important to remember that there are many different reasons why children read.

Educators in Ontario tend to think of literature as existing to affirm students’ identities, which they think of as a way of helping the students’ well-being — by seeing themselves reflected in the pages of literature. That has led them, in places like the Peel region, to remove every book that is more than fifteen years old. I think that that’s a really impoverished view of how and why children read.

Educators in Ontario tend to think of literature as existing to affirm students’ identities, which they think of as a way of helping the students’ well-being — by seeing themselves reflected in the pages of literature … I think that that’s a really impoverished view of how and why children read.

It’s also a potentially demeaning one — especially to minority children, who might have had that powerful experience of reading Socrates or Shakespeare. There are so many amazing minority writers who write about this experience. Just to name one: Ta-Nehisi Coates. In his most recent book, he talks about reading Macbeth and how much that meant to him. How the streets of Baltimore felt differently to him after he read Macbeth. This is an experience that, with all of their theories, the progressive educators today would deprive children of.

I think we need to look to our children and take cues from them. Provide them with the history, and the legacy, and the heritage of our literary culture. We should absolutely ensure that our libraries are diverse. I hope that every child can see themselves reflected in the pages of literature. The way to do that is to build [collections] out, to diversity them. But not to presume that we know better than the children. Not to presume that we know best what they need to be reading. That needs to come from within them.

If you’re interested in thinking through how activism can produce bad art, you might be interested in listening to my podcast conversation with the famed American writer George Packer. You can listen to that episode here. And if you’re interested in an ode to childhood reading, you can read my Walrus essay on the late YA author Madeleine L'Engle here.