On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy

Critic Wells (Norman Jewison) delivers a potent behind-the-scenes look at book banning in this standout account. Wells was a member of the group that chose which titles should be pulled from the shelves of his children’s school library after the librarian expressed a desire to cull old books they found “too Eurocentric, too male, too heteronormative.” He was flummoxed by the process, which he found led to “boil[ing] away the imaginative quality of children’s stories and treat[ing] them as vehicles for politically coded messages” rather than opportunities for discussion. Wells offers an accessible history of censorship, covering Augustus’s book burning in ancient Rome, and advocates for using John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle,” which holds that “speech should be regulated only when it might reasonably be expected to cause harm to others,” when considering removing titles from circulation. Along the way, he observes that, per Mills, those who claim to know what is and is not harmful “have confused their certainty with absolute certainty”—the imposition of which never ends well. Wells convincingly advocates for teachers to center ambiguity, sympathy, and curiosity when teaching about language, rather than harm, and for “the building of critical thinking abilities.” It’s a decisive and fascinating take on a hot-button issue. (June)