(06:25 pm) Asheim's Folly

    The article "Not Censorship But Selection" by Lester Asheim was posted on ALA's website this past week. Since it was published in 1953 and ALA doesn't make a habit of posting articles new or old to its site I have to assume there's a reason they felt the need to dig it out and display it, in effect endorsing it. So let's take a look.

    What Asheim tried to do was distinguish between censorship and selection and to say that librarians are the selectors. He's not very specific about who the censors are just that they are not librarians. Asheim gets an 'A' for honesty since his first paragraph admits that such things are subjective and that we as individuals have a tendency to view ourselves in a positive light and those we disagree with in a negative light. Unfortunately it will haunt him throughout the piece.

    He goes over the basics of censorship and the fact that yes, due to space and money, libraries cannot purchase every book. His primary argument is that censorship is a negative view and selection is a positive view:

The major characteristic which makes for the all-important difference seems to me to be this: that the selector's approach is positive, while that of the censor is negative. This is more than a verbal quibble; it transforms the entire act and the steps included in it. For to the selector, the important thing is to find reasons to keep the book. Given such a guiding principle, the selector looks for values, for strengths, for virtues which will over shadow minor objections. For the censor, on the other hand, the important thing is to find reasons to reject the book; his guiding principle leads him to seek out the objectionable features, the weaknesses, the possibilities for misinterpretation. The positive selector asks what the reaction of a rational intelligent adult would be to the content of the work; the censor fears for the results on the weak, the warped, and the irrational. The selector says, if there is anything good in this book let us try to keep it; the censor says, if there is anything bad in this book, let us reject it. And since there is seldom a flawless work in any form, the censor's approach can destroy much that is worth saving.

    Asheim would have done well to reread his opening paragraph before writing this. If a librarian rejects a book because they couldn't find enough positive aspects to defend it then what were they finding instead? That any book can be censored is to ignore the most common reasons that it occurs, sex and vulgarity. Way down in the second paragraph under 'Negative or Positive?' Asheim states that the important thing for censors is "to find reasons to reject the book." In the next paragraph he argues that censors don't take into account the whole work (a criticism I hear often). Asheim's first example of censorship was Ulysses by James Joyce. From the Amazon review came this...

"In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession"."

Emetic means 'vomit inducing' by the way. Censors didn't look for reasons to censor the book, it proudly displayed its offenses (as is often the case). Asheim tries to make a normal response to an abnormal situation somehow sinister. And to say that someone has to 'go looking' to find 'anything bad' is irresponsible and dishonest considering his first example.

    Ulysses is an adult book that is close to 800 pages. I agree with Asheim that it shouldn't have been censored. It should be an adult's decision whether an offensive part of a book outweighs the whole. But that was 1933. Today ALA is using Asheim arguments to fight against any attempt at limiting access to materials not by adults but by children. A child is not capable of weighing what's important or what's not. I read a book with a lot of vulgarity and sexuality I don't assume that's normal behavior. A child reads the same book and that's exactly what they think.

    I'll be honest myself and say it can be very difficult to evaluate discussions like these when there is such a difference in viewpoints. Case in point in the fifth paragraph Asheim says:

The real question of censorship versus selection arises when the librarian, exercising his own judgment, decides against a book which has every legal right to representation on his shelves.

    Emphasis mine. He follows this thought again near the end of the article when he states "... the selector begins, ideally, with a presumption of liberty of thought, the censor does not." Asheim is very specific in saying that he is discussing library censorship not government censorship. If that's the case where is the loss of liberty? There is no legal right for any book to sit on any library shelf because there is no legal right for libraries to exists. Libraries are a community investment and are based on the presumption that they will have a maximum positive impact on the community with a minimum amount of negative interference. If its felt that the library is having a greater and greater negative impact over time then the community has every right to shut down the library and toss every book in it away.

    Asheim again reaches too far when he states:

But viewed realistically, the librarian is promoting the freedom to read by making as accessible as possible as many things as he can, and his selection is more likely to be in the direction of stimulating controversy and introducing innovation than in suppressing the new and perpetuating the stereotype. That is why he so often selects works which shock some people. The books which have something new to say are most likely to shock and consequently may not readily find another outlet through which to say it.

    First, this is the complete opposite of liberty, specifically for the patron. A librarian is there to assist the needs of the patron not to push controversy or to shock them. The patron's liberty is in not being saddled with your hang-ups. If that is a librarian's most likely direction taken then they are a failure in their profession. Second, the very idea that people need to be shocked (another myth still traveling strong today) completely ignores the obvious point that shock is a temporary effect that usually only works once or twice. Then you have to find something new, something more shocking. The idea that shocking people is somehow important is crack cocaine for people too afraid to take the real thing. Societies create laws and rules for people to abide by. Sometimes they are too strict and a civil society turns into not much more than a herd of cattle. So you have to stretch the rules a little, let people breathe. But sometimes they are too loose and when they aren't tightened civil society turns into large groups of predators and prey. Librarians have an obligation as members of society's framework to help keep civilization balanced. So Ulysses gets read and children's internet gets filtered.

    Asheim does make two statements that are in fact true and somewhat disheartening considering they remain true over fifty years after they were made...

The librarian also feels an obligation to select in terms of standards—and there are some books that he would not buy even if money were no problem. Unfortunately, some of our standards are sufficiently subjective, sufficiently vague, and sufficiently imprecise to serve the uses of the censors as well as of the selectors. Merely to cite the standards does little to prove our claim that ours is not a censoring function...

Still another criterion for selection is the presumed effect upon the reader, and here again we have only our guesses, based upon our own individual subjective reaction. And here again, we have a standard which is the basis for most of what we should all be agreed may properly be called censorship. What other reason is there for censorship than the assumption that the condemned book will have a harmful effect upon its readers—or at least on some of them? That we know nothing about reading effects really, that no solid studies exist which prove that books have a bad effect upon readers is of very little use in a battle against censorship. If we have almost no evidence that books are harmful, we have less that they are not, and it is quite understandable that those who favor censorship should advocate wariness against materials which may be harmful. If you don't know whether a bottle contains poison or not—I paraphrase a standard argument—it is better not to drink from it

    Personally I think the MLS is worth less then a greasy diner's placemat but the current ALA President likes to talk a lot about the importance of professional standards. Yet there are no real selection standards, there is no research on the effects of reading. ALA should be careful about highlighting what are two very large holes in the idea that we are a profession unless they are finally willing to address them and stop indulging in Asheim's 'amusing word game'.

Tuesday November 29, 2005

  (10:49 pm) Stuff

    Jack has a good post on ALA's 2006 keynote speaker in New Orleans, Madeline Albright. Madeleine Albright, Barack Obama, Richard Clarke... the Grand Canyon doesn't echo as badly as ALA does.

    Corrigenda had an interesting post last week on Intelligent Design that I meant to link to sooner. I suppose I'll eventually post my own bit on it but I've been avoiding it like the plague.

    ALA Councilor James Casey posted the following email on ALACOUN today:

Oak Lawn resident Mark Decker has been on a campaign since March 2005 to remove Playboy magazine from our Oak Lawn Public Library. He has thus far been unsuccessful. Our Board voted unanimously to retain that title in our collection on June 21. This was publicized heavily in the Chicago area. The issue hasn’t “gone away” as Decker began lobbying our Village government, has broadened his focus to filtering issues and expanded his demands for removal of other “indecent” titles. Most recently, he and his supporters launched a website. http://www.safelibraries.org ALA and the ACLU are among the chief targets of this site. Several “ALA-Indoctrinated” Librarians are named in various sections, but the chief target of the authors seems to be Judith Krug. “Now we come to the ALA. While the ALA has a president elected yearly, the top dog at the ALA is someone working tirelessly, year after year, with ten of thousands of supporters and millions and millions in funding, to ensure, among other goals, children maintain access to pornography.”

If Judith Krug is really the “top dog” of ALA, maybe she should get a raise!

    Good for Mr. Decker. I don't have a problem with Playboy being in a large library as long as its not accessible to minors but Mr. Decker has every right to do what he's doing and his assessment of Krug is pretty accurate. Check out the Krug quotes page on Wikipedia linked from his site.

    Okay, I'm done for the night. Tomorrow I will post my bit on the 'Not Censorship But Selection' that I mentioned last week. Night.

Monday November 28, 2005

  (10:25 am) Moral Education

    An interesting article over at NRO covering the new Harry Potter movie and Pride and Prejudice:

The real danger in our culture is that many children grow up in a moral and spiritual vacuum into which the worst of Hollywood popular culture — film, music, and video games — marches to set up its own pedagogy, which atrophies the moral imagination and deforms desire.