“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.