This is an excellent reflection, thank you! I particularly appreciate how you've set out the tension between our stated professional commitments to intellectual freedom and the moral imperative to protect the borrowing public from perceived misinformation. I look forward to the next installments!
Thank you, John, for this excellent post on the challenges for freedom of thought (and freedom to read) that have taken hold in the library field in recent years. The monoculture about certain topics that some in the profession have created results from lots of personally-created "Overton Windows" that add up to the monoculture--at least that's my hypothesis. Shrinking the "Overton Windows" about what's acceptable, and what's not, in a library collection, is a temptation for too many colleagues. And groupishness sets in, and cancellations of those who want to maintain open inquiry, results. Language policing and preference falsification are also collateral tendencies that result from the need to create conformity--and "purity tests" are now found too often, in a spiral of censoriouness.
I agree that books, or videos, or any other format, by authors I strongly disagree with (RFK Jr., or anything by the current spate of "influencers") should be available in order to promote counter-speech or "counter-reading."
I look forward to reading your next two articles. Thanks again!
"From Pearl’s perspective, the citywide book clubs, like her Book Lust reviews, were intended to entice people into trying something new. They weren’t meant to impose required reading for civic improvement on citizens."
We had a freshie read at NC A&T while I was there. I was on that committee. I lobbied hard one year for CAPTAIN AMERICA: RED, WHITE, & BLACK, a graphic novel that was full of forgotten history (as well as sensationalist conspiracy theories). The historian and one of the English professors were down with the idea, but the chair was like, 'A comic book? Really?'
Similar to the stories recounted in this piece, it became focused on social and political issues, which of course were hard to get committee members to agree on.
Thank you for the obvious time and effort you put into this well-written piece. I did not know all this history regarding Nancy Pearl.
When I have defended intellectual freedom in the past, I've often been asked about Holocaust denial books. That one always gave me pause. Since then what I have gleaned is that the term "Holocaust denial" is a bit misleading. I have yet to come across anyone denying that Jews were placed into work camps where they suffered greatly and died; the disputes seem to be over what led up to those events, what actually occurred in the camps that led to mass deaths, and how many people died. My new opinion is that it is healthier to air those disputes than to try to censor them and that the truth will out.
In regards to Kennedy and vaccines, I found the book "Turtles All the Way Down" illuminating and have heard some interesting takes from the authors of "Dissolving Illusions." This gives further weight to your point that librarians should not try to act as arbiters of truth.
There are so many examples of the types of books we are in no position to determine the truth of-- diet fads, the Bible, various historical takes, political works astrology, and on and on.
I think "Holocaust denial", the phrase, is a thought terminating cliche right there. The word, "holocaust", has a very weird trajectory, as well. It's from the ancient Greek and means a sacrifice in which the whole animal is given to the gods. "holo" meaning whole, and "caust" meaning burn, roughly. Eventually, the ancient Greeks stopped doing animal sacrifices. But, I guess, persons who went to Eton had to learn that word, and so they started using it as in jokes, as "the guests made a holocaust of the picnic". Then somehow this ancient Greek word, now being borrowed and used for humorous exaggeration, was turned into the name for a bunch of atrocities committed against Jews specifically, and hence capitalized, because it was a proper name and not a descriptive noun. And, in my opinion, that was a bad step, because now there was a symbol, "The Holocaust", divorced from fact in most people's minds, and yet another in-group/out-group test. So that attracted people who are naturally resistant to being told what to think, or who are just contrarians, or whatever. Similar is the phrase "evolution denier", uttered with a sneer, implying knuckle dragging bigot who does not follow "The Science". I have come to notice that most people who "believe in evolution" understand it very poorly as it's really quite subtle and brings up deep philosophical questions about essence. Yes, I have also read large chunks of Richard Dawkins's early work, e.g., "The Ancestor's Tale", which doesn't hide the subtlety of the theory at all, and I like ruminating about the fact that when Darwin wrote his "Origin of Species" he was using the Aristotelian definition of "species", as there was none better available, and that his own work laid the foundation that broke that very definition. Aristotle is to Darwin as Newton is to Einstein in that regard. I won't get started with "climate denial"; that one has all the same problems of the other two.
Another point is that the librarians, due to their fondness for being up-to-date, are constantly getting rid of the books that really re-enforce the idea that something terrible happened to Jews under the Nazis. I grew up in the 80s, and the libraries were still full of books which simply had that as an understood fact; books like Richard Adams's "The Plague Dogs", for example. Another book which I was lucky to read as an adult before it was removed from my local library was Sam and Beryl Epstein's "The Rocket Pioneers" (https://www.librarything.com/work/7148143/t/The-Rocket-Pioneers-On-the-Road-to-Space). It was removed because it was written before the moon landings and so considered obsolete, presumably, but not only is it fascinating rocket history, but it also tells a disturbing store of the Nazis infiltrating every organization including the young men's rocketry societies established in interwar Germany by people who were probably there. As the uniformity of modernity is imposed on library collections, all these nuggets of fact are discarded.
Weeding is always difficult. At my last job (small system) we had books on the shelves that hadn't circulated in ten to twenty years. Some were obvious tossers but others were still relevant but no-one was reading them. I would try to leave some of them on the shelves and give them a couple more years but they would still sit. Larger systems are more able to accommodate those titles I imagine.
Weeding will always require judgement, I agree. But I review the books I read, and my library system uses Syndectics backed by LibraryThing, where my reviews are held. What that means is that my library was too weed happy to bother to be concerned that a person had reviewed and liked the book in the recent past, which would be last few years, but... A far worse incident occurred when a book that I had been more or less continuously checking out for the whole previous year, not from my local library but from a nearby one, was abruptly weeded while I was in the middle of reading it. I knew the exact shelf location by then...Why was it taking me so long? It was a book by Isaac Asimov called "World of Carbon" and my organic chemistry background is non-existent. (https://www.librarything.com/work/443606/t/World-of-Carbon). There are no substitutes for that book, and I have made no improvements in my organic chemistry knowledge since they took that book away. I believe I can still get it from the state wide library system, but on far less generous terms, i.e. no renewals. Aaaargh!!!
In general I like this post. I think you need to eschew long lists of " wrong-headed, dangerous, and discredited ideas over the course of history", though. People with specialist knowledge will immediately start to argue with you. For example, from my rather large reading of the history of science, I can assure that the general agreement regarding Ptolemy's Alamagest (translation "the Majestic") was that it was awesomely good, just a bit wrong. Sort of like Euclid, but for astronomy. And so forth. You remind us that librarians don't know everything, which is good, but then you forget that fact literally in the same essay, which is bad.
Had I been there, I would have helped you out with this sentence "Similarly, Donald Trump’s theory that the 2020 election was stolen is obviously wrong and potentially damaging to America’s democratic institutions." You need a "believe" in that sentence, too. I believe that the irregularities in the 2020 election were tremendous, and nobody will ever know who actually won. That's my opinion against yours, but I'm probably the comparative expert in US elections having written multiple articles about my local elections, spent tens of hours at my local polls and city hall as an observer, and read multiple informative books on the mechanics of elections.
A couple of titles for "counter-reading," since John mentions RFK Jr. and his conspiracism in this article. I think both of these added to every public *and* academic library collection would add to needed viewpoint diversity -- alongside the titles mentioned in the Comments about the history of vaccines, and the debates about childhood vaccinations in general, engendered by the new HHS Secretary's appointment.
The Certainty Illusion: What You Don't Know and Why It Matters, Timothy Caulfield
This is an excellent reflection, thank you! I particularly appreciate how you've set out the tension between our stated professional commitments to intellectual freedom and the moral imperative to protect the borrowing public from perceived misinformation. I look forward to the next installments!
Thank you, John, for this excellent post on the challenges for freedom of thought (and freedom to read) that have taken hold in the library field in recent years. The monoculture about certain topics that some in the profession have created results from lots of personally-created "Overton Windows" that add up to the monoculture--at least that's my hypothesis. Shrinking the "Overton Windows" about what's acceptable, and what's not, in a library collection, is a temptation for too many colleagues. And groupishness sets in, and cancellations of those who want to maintain open inquiry, results. Language policing and preference falsification are also collateral tendencies that result from the need to create conformity--and "purity tests" are now found too often, in a spiral of censoriouness.
I agree that books, or videos, or any other format, by authors I strongly disagree with (RFK Jr., or anything by the current spate of "influencers") should be available in order to promote counter-speech or "counter-reading."
I look forward to reading your next two articles. Thanks again!
2 books on the history of fiction in PLS.
Carrier, E. J. (1965). Fiction in public libraries, 1876–1900. New York, NY: Scarecrow Press.
Carrier, E. J. (1985). Fiction in public libraries, 1900–1950. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited.
"From Pearl’s perspective, the citywide book clubs, like her Book Lust reviews, were intended to entice people into trying something new. They weren’t meant to impose required reading for civic improvement on citizens."
We had a freshie read at NC A&T while I was there. I was on that committee. I lobbied hard one year for CAPTAIN AMERICA: RED, WHITE, & BLACK, a graphic novel that was full of forgotten history (as well as sensationalist conspiracy theories). The historian and one of the English professors were down with the idea, but the chair was like, 'A comic book? Really?'
I chaired a "One Book" committee for a few years. It became quite fraught at times.
Say more about that?
Similar to the stories recounted in this piece, it became focused on social and political issues, which of course were hard to get committee members to agree on.
Thank you for the obvious time and effort you put into this well-written piece. I did not know all this history regarding Nancy Pearl.
When I have defended intellectual freedom in the past, I've often been asked about Holocaust denial books. That one always gave me pause. Since then what I have gleaned is that the term "Holocaust denial" is a bit misleading. I have yet to come across anyone denying that Jews were placed into work camps where they suffered greatly and died; the disputes seem to be over what led up to those events, what actually occurred in the camps that led to mass deaths, and how many people died. My new opinion is that it is healthier to air those disputes than to try to censor them and that the truth will out.
In regards to Kennedy and vaccines, I found the book "Turtles All the Way Down" illuminating and have heard some interesting takes from the authors of "Dissolving Illusions." This gives further weight to your point that librarians should not try to act as arbiters of truth.
There are so many examples of the types of books we are in no position to determine the truth of-- diet fads, the Bible, various historical takes, political works astrology, and on and on.
I think "Holocaust denial", the phrase, is a thought terminating cliche right there. The word, "holocaust", has a very weird trajectory, as well. It's from the ancient Greek and means a sacrifice in which the whole animal is given to the gods. "holo" meaning whole, and "caust" meaning burn, roughly. Eventually, the ancient Greeks stopped doing animal sacrifices. But, I guess, persons who went to Eton had to learn that word, and so they started using it as in jokes, as "the guests made a holocaust of the picnic". Then somehow this ancient Greek word, now being borrowed and used for humorous exaggeration, was turned into the name for a bunch of atrocities committed against Jews specifically, and hence capitalized, because it was a proper name and not a descriptive noun. And, in my opinion, that was a bad step, because now there was a symbol, "The Holocaust", divorced from fact in most people's minds, and yet another in-group/out-group test. So that attracted people who are naturally resistant to being told what to think, or who are just contrarians, or whatever. Similar is the phrase "evolution denier", uttered with a sneer, implying knuckle dragging bigot who does not follow "The Science". I have come to notice that most people who "believe in evolution" understand it very poorly as it's really quite subtle and brings up deep philosophical questions about essence. Yes, I have also read large chunks of Richard Dawkins's early work, e.g., "The Ancestor's Tale", which doesn't hide the subtlety of the theory at all, and I like ruminating about the fact that when Darwin wrote his "Origin of Species" he was using the Aristotelian definition of "species", as there was none better available, and that his own work laid the foundation that broke that very definition. Aristotle is to Darwin as Newton is to Einstein in that regard. I won't get started with "climate denial"; that one has all the same problems of the other two.
Interesting, I did not know the origin of the word "holocaust."
Another point is that the librarians, due to their fondness for being up-to-date, are constantly getting rid of the books that really re-enforce the idea that something terrible happened to Jews under the Nazis. I grew up in the 80s, and the libraries were still full of books which simply had that as an understood fact; books like Richard Adams's "The Plague Dogs", for example. Another book which I was lucky to read as an adult before it was removed from my local library was Sam and Beryl Epstein's "The Rocket Pioneers" (https://www.librarything.com/work/7148143/t/The-Rocket-Pioneers-On-the-Road-to-Space). It was removed because it was written before the moon landings and so considered obsolete, presumably, but not only is it fascinating rocket history, but it also tells a disturbing store of the Nazis infiltrating every organization including the young men's rocketry societies established in interwar Germany by people who were probably there. As the uniformity of modernity is imposed on library collections, all these nuggets of fact are discarded.
Weeding is always difficult. At my last job (small system) we had books on the shelves that hadn't circulated in ten to twenty years. Some were obvious tossers but others were still relevant but no-one was reading them. I would try to leave some of them on the shelves and give them a couple more years but they would still sit. Larger systems are more able to accommodate those titles I imagine.
Weeding will always require judgement, I agree. But I review the books I read, and my library system uses Syndectics backed by LibraryThing, where my reviews are held. What that means is that my library was too weed happy to bother to be concerned that a person had reviewed and liked the book in the recent past, which would be last few years, but... A far worse incident occurred when a book that I had been more or less continuously checking out for the whole previous year, not from my local library but from a nearby one, was abruptly weeded while I was in the middle of reading it. I knew the exact shelf location by then...Why was it taking me so long? It was a book by Isaac Asimov called "World of Carbon" and my organic chemistry background is non-existent. (https://www.librarything.com/work/443606/t/World-of-Carbon). There are no substitutes for that book, and I have made no improvements in my organic chemistry knowledge since they took that book away. I believe I can still get it from the state wide library system, but on far less generous terms, i.e. no renewals. Aaaargh!!!
My thesis adviser at University of Chicago GLS was Lester Asheim. (couldn't resist telling you).
In general I like this post. I think you need to eschew long lists of " wrong-headed, dangerous, and discredited ideas over the course of history", though. People with specialist knowledge will immediately start to argue with you. For example, from my rather large reading of the history of science, I can assure that the general agreement regarding Ptolemy's Alamagest (translation "the Majestic") was that it was awesomely good, just a bit wrong. Sort of like Euclid, but for astronomy. And so forth. You remind us that librarians don't know everything, which is good, but then you forget that fact literally in the same essay, which is bad.
Had I been there, I would have helped you out with this sentence "Similarly, Donald Trump’s theory that the 2020 election was stolen is obviously wrong and potentially damaging to America’s democratic institutions." You need a "believe" in that sentence, too. I believe that the irregularities in the 2020 election were tremendous, and nobody will ever know who actually won. That's my opinion against yours, but I'm probably the comparative expert in US elections having written multiple articles about my local elections, spent tens of hours at my local polls and city hall as an observer, and read multiple informative books on the mechanics of elections.
On a more positive note, I've added an audiobook by Nancy Pearl to my list.
A couple of titles for "counter-reading," since John mentions RFK Jr. and his conspiracism in this article. I think both of these added to every public *and* academic library collection would add to needed viewpoint diversity -- alongside the titles mentioned in the Comments about the history of vaccines, and the debates about childhood vaccinations in general, engendered by the new HHS Secretary's appointment.
The Certainty Illusion: What You Don't Know and Why It Matters, Timothy Caulfield
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/713451/the-certainty-illusion-by-timothy-caulfield/
Anti-Scientific Americans, Matthew Motta.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anti-scientific-americans-9780197788806?cc=us&lang=en&
It's pretty cool that Thomas Sowell is both an intellectual, by his own definition, and an anti-intellectual, by instinct: https://www.librarything.com/work/9305592/t/Intellectuals-and-Society .