Posted on by rjonakait

Education and Tolerance and Discernment

“The highest result of education is tolerance.” Helen Keller.

“Education, properly understood, is that which teaches discernment.” Joseph Roux

Those accused of book bannings are often vilified, but maybe they just have bad public relations. Book banners often say that they are not banning books but only restricting them to appropriate ages. That seems noncontroversial. We can all agree that A Brief History of Time is not appropriate for second graders, at least not any I have ever known. But the parents searching bookshelves are not concerned with the difficulty of the text. Instead, no matter the ease of the prose, they seek to remove books that present certain ideas, observations, opinions, facts, or concepts. This, too, might be something all can agree upon or at least discuss. All topics are not appropriate for all ages. Perhaps we are only differing on the details: When is the suitable time to introduce certain ideas, observations, opinions, facts, and concepts?

However, that is not really what is going on. Those yanking books off shelves only remove books containing certain subjects — ones with ideas, observations, opinions, facts, and concepts that they do not agree with. These books primarily address nonheterosexual relationships and race. Apparently the subject matter touching on these issues is inappropriate no matter what the age of the student. Certain advanced placement courses in high school have been banned even though students taking such courses are mature enough to seek college credit. Indeed, some states have even limited the presentation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) topics to college students. While these students are assumed to be fully adult, they are, apparently, not mature enough for such topics. Indeed, some states have gone even further and seek to limit these concepts being presented by corporations to their employees.

Even so, I may have something in common with those seeking to hide books. By their actions the censors indicate a belief in the power and significance of books. Why restrict access to a book if you don’t believe it can affect ideas and behavior, thoughts and actions? As an avid reader, I, too, want to believe in the importance and power of books.

But I suspect that the book restrictors act not just with a concern that students will learn “too early” about same sex couples, our history of slavery and continuing racial oppression. The book removers act out of a rigid worldview. There is right, and there is wrong. There is morality, and there is immorality. There is good, and there is evil. There is male, and there is female. The censors fear books because they can cause readers to question such inflexible categories. The censors do not want readers to conclude that the world is nuanced and complex.

This has made me think about Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. This best seller, published in 2003, is about the author’s experiences during the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath. The book is interlaced with stories from a book group of seven women reading banned Western literary works led by Professor Nafisi.

Although she writes about works of fiction, what she says often applies to works of history and children’s books. Nafisi says about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, “You don’t read Gatsby to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.” This, of course, is what some don’t want. Their rigid categories of right and wrong should not be questioned.

Perhaps most worrying for the censors is that books might lead to a sympathy and understanding of those whom the book removers despise and fear. Nafisi writes, “The respect for others, empathy, . . .is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabakov and Bellow.” Children with empathy are a threat. They may reject the rigidity of self-righteous adults. Nafisi writes, “This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.” Elsewhere she says, “Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to ‘see’ others, hence to empathize with them.”

The censors wish to stifle the natural curiosity of children, afraid of the possible empathetic results that could lead to questioning the censors’ moral authority. But, as Nafisi says in Reading Lolita, “Humbert [Humbert] was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people.”

It is not really the specifics of the books that animates the censors’ actions. Instead, their fundamental concern is to prevent challenges to their rigid, authoritarian world view.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

On Christmas Day I received an email from a legal group that claims to fight for the religious rights of all faiths but proclaims itself Christian. The message did wish me Merry Christmas and said that on Christmas “we celebrate the birth of the One who makes our spiritual freedom possible.” I don’t understand that phrase, but I expected what was coming. Jesus may make spiritual freedom possible, but He could be helped along if I would forward some money to this organization. Is this what the Christmas spirit now means–fundraising for your own organization on the day to celebrate the birth of Christ? I don’t think being nummamorous ???, especially on Christmas, seems very Christian. Luckily for me, however, my Christmas spirit was not affected because I did not read the email until Boxing Day.

Old joke: The sailor, when asked what he did with his money, replied, “Part went for liquor, part went for women, and the rest I spent foolishly.”

Christmas Day is over, but we are in the twelve days of Christmas leading up to the Epiphany on January 6, which is a big holiday in some cultures. However, while perhaps it should be sung now, the song The Twelve Days of Christmas seems to be heard before Christmas Day, not after. I like Christmas carols, but I would be happy if I heard The Twelve Days only once in a season, or perhaps not at all. And doesn’t it contravene the Christmas spirit to give someone 78 gifts?

Those who worship the version of the Second Amendment the Supreme Court created) a decade or two ago should send their true loves a cartridge in a pear tree.

Who for twelve consecutive winter days sends over a pear tree? And where do they get all those partridges?

The young woman next to me pointed to the book I had placed on the bar and said that she was trying to see what I was reading. I held it up to display the cover and said, “It’s a fictionalized biography of Thomas Mann.” She looked as if I had not uttered an English sentence. I added, “He has also written a fictionalized biography of Henry James.” She still looked blank. I decided that,  despite this evidence, she must be a reader. Did she have any recommendations? She could not come up with one. She told me that she was there to meet someone she had only just met from an online writing course. We did not speak much after that.

“It is a common failing of an ambitious mind to overrate itself.” Lady Caroline Smith.

Browsing in a library, I pulled out a collection of three short novels that had been reissued in a single volume a couple decades after their initial publications. The back cover had paragraphs from two noted (that means I recognized the names) literary critics. One stated, “Whoever she is, she is the most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years.” The other began, “She has cut to roundness and smoothed to convexity a little crystal of literary form that concentrates the light like a burning glass.” WOW. I grabbed the book and looked forward to reading it, only partly because I anticipated the pleasure of commenting on it (in a superior fashion) to others “What? You’ve never read so-and-so?!” I gave up after thirty-seven pages. I concluded that just because you have read Henry James, that does not mean you should try to write like him.

Posted on by rjonakait

Abortion Ban Redux (continued)

          Kate Simon’s memoir Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, like Bad Girl, also describes working-class1920s New York, although Simon is narrating from the viewpoint of a young girl. She and her family were then living in a Bronx neighborhood largely inhabited by immigrant Jews and Italians, and she was struggling to understand the world she was encountering, including the visits of Dr. James. He was seldom seen by the kids because he came when school was in session. No explanation was given for the appearance of this tall, fair “American” in a neighborhood of short, dark “foreigners.” However, Simon noticed, the mothers he visited, who were fine in the morning, were in bed when school let out.

          Years later Simon’s medical relatives told her that Dr. James had had a prestigious and lucrative medical practice and came from the prosperous New England family that produced the writers and intellectuals William and Henry James. After his children were raised, Dr. James dedicated himself to poor immigrant women who had “no sex information, no birth-control clinics, nothing but knitting needles, hat pins, lengths of wire, the drinking of noxious mixtures while they sat in scalding baths to prevent the birth of yet another child. Some of these women died of infections, and often when these procedures did not work, the women went to term and then let the infant die of exposure or suffocation.”

          To prevent such deaths, Dr. James went from one immigrant neighborhood to another performing abortions. Often charging nothing but never more than a dollar or two, James performed thousands of the procedures. All the adults knew what he did, and according to Simon, so did the police and the Board of Health who generally let him be. Periodically, however, when there was some change in officialdom, he was arrested. He wouldn’t post bail but contacted colleagues. Doctors then thronged the courthouse where “they pleaded, they argued, they shouted, they accused the police and the court of ignorance and inhumanity,” and each time Dr. James was released.

          James was a skillful and careful practitioner and would not perform an abortion if it would be too dangerous. Simon had a much younger sister, and when Kate was an adult, her mother told Simon that the sister was unwanted. James, however, would not perform an abortion because Simon’s mother had already had too many and another would be hazardous. Shortly before she died, Simon’s mother told Kate that she had had thirteen abortions (as well as three children) and that other women in the neighborhood had had even more. Why do you think, the mother continued, that the Italian women urged to have large families by the Catholic Church had only two or three kids? “Certainly it wasn’t the abstinence of Italian husbands, no more controlled than Jewish husbands. It was the work of the blessed hands of that wonderful old goy.”

            Viña Delmar’s Bad Girl and Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive, both set in lower-class communities of 1920s New York City, indicate that abortion was prevalent in this country a hundred years ago, and they were common earlier.  Thomas J. Schlereth, in his book, Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915, cites data showing that abortions were inexpensive and common in the late nineteenth century, with ten dollars being the standard rate in Boston and New York. He reports that in 1898 the Michigan Board of Health estimated that one-third of pregnancies were artificially terminated.

          Willful infant deaths may also have been frequent. We tend not to think about infanticide, but the concern in our colonial days over it was so great that special evidentiary and other rules were applied when a mother reported a stillbirth or that a baby died shortly after birth.

          One of the reasons for the number of abortions was ignorance about sex. In Bad Girls, Dot’s husband has no idea why she is making monthly marks on their calendar. In our colonial history, and even into the twenty-first century some men believed that a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm and that a woman could only have an orgasm if the intercourse were consensual. Thus, a raped woman could not get pregnant.

          Surely sexual ignorance led to abortions. But abortions and infanticides also occurred because of lack or knowledge of other forms of birth control so that the only meaningful “birth control” was abortion.

          Perhaps illegal abortions decreased after the 1920s, but that is unknowable. I knew a couple women of my mother’s and my generation who had abortions before they were legal in this country. These were what most would see as ordinary women. Only because I was close to them did I find out about the illegal terminations of their pregnancies. I can assume that of the many older women I have known less well, some, maybe many, also had illegal abortions.

(concluded June 3)