One thing the right and left can still agree on: those on the other side are guilty of censorship. Well, they’re both right. Attempting to control what people can think and say has unfortunately become an accepted strategy across the political spectrum. The right says it’s protecting children; the left says it’s protecting minorities. However noble the motive, the impulse is authoritarian at its core. If you control language, you limit what ideas can be thought and discussed, and if you control that you can make people do whatever you want. One cannot both love freedom and countenance attacks on free speech no matter how threatening that speech might seem. I’ll save the language policing of the left for another day. For now, I want to address censorship on the right.
Recently, conservatives have begun using the power of the state to simply abolish ideas they find objectionable, usually uncomfortable realities about sex and race. Examples include restrictions on school curriculums, library books, sexuality education and drag shows. This campaign is doomed to fail: banning something only makes it desirable, and in the internet age people will always find ways to circumvent the authorities. However, the harms of these attacks on intellectual freedom are real.
For one thing, depriving children of information doesn’t protect them, it makes them vulnerable. A child lacking knowledge of sexuality and anatomy is a prime target for a predator because they can’t understand what’s being done to them. Similarly, a child deprived of historical truth won’t fully comprehend the world they’re living in or be able to change it. All they can do is believe as they’re told, and it’s hard not to suspect that may be the true goal of these attacks on knowledge.
Conservative politicians claim that censorship protects parental rights, but this is Orwellian double-speak at its finest. (If you don’t get that reference, head to the library before it gets banned.) Allowing ignorant busybodies to censor books and curriculums they don’t like empowers only the most easily-offended and intellectually timid parents while trampling the rights of everyone else. These politicians claim that they’re “fighting indoctrination,” but limiting access to knowledge is indoctrination. Ray Bradbury taught that if you can restrict what thoughts people can think, you can control their lives even as they think themselves free. (If you don’t get that reference, head to the library before it gets banned.) Conservatives’ actual complaint seems to be that the kids aren’t being indoctrinated the way they’d like.
Similarly, restricting material because it makes students uncomfortable is a specious endeavor: education is supposed to be uncomfortable. That’s what having your thinking challenged feels like. Information that never challenges your beliefs or makes you uncomfortable is not education, it’s propaganda, and trying to make intellectual endeavors wholesome and appropriate (whatever that means) undermines the whole enterprise.
Just as the immune system is tempered by exposure to germs, minds need to be exposed to challenging ideas to strengthen their ability to think and reason. As such, disagreements should not be seen as battles for dominance but rather as opportunities to expand and improve our thinking. If our ideas and beliefs are sound, challenging them will only make them stronger. If they are not, we should be grateful to have them refuted and replaced with something better.
I spent my youth reading “The Communist Manifesto,” “The Satanic Bible,” “The Turner Diaries,” and other “dangerous” books which, notably, I wouldn’t have even known existed if adults hadn’t told me not to read them. But I didn’t become a communist, a Satanist, or a white supremacist. Instead, I learned how others see the world. I learned how to challenge their reasoning and my own. I became attentive to misinformation and deception. In short, I learned how to think for myself and not simply swallow what I’m told. That kind of intellectual freedom is the bedrock from which every other freedom arises, and only those who wish to rule, or be ruled, see it as a threat. Lovers of freedom must never stop fighting for unfettered access to knowledge and ideas — especially those which make us uncomfortable.
Urie is a lifelong Idahoan and graduate of the University of Idaho. He lives in Moscow with his wife and two children.
