Free speech, knowledge of history, and even scientific inquiry are currently under attack in this country. Massachusetts has always been a leading light in American thought, a center of learning. At the moment, the Massachusetts legislature is considering an Act Regarding Free Expression, which would protect librarians as they work to provide the keys to knowledge and self-understanding, with access for all.
I became a reader in the small, then-rural town of Stow, Massachusetts, haunting its red-brick, Victorian library and its school libraries. I remember, as a kid, scanning the library cards in the books I checked out, running through the names of previous readers who’d read that book stretching back decades, long before I was born, a lineage of learning. In that little town we could still read books that took us to far corners of time and space. We could learn about the world around us – and how we fit into that world.
Now I’m an author. My satirical science fiction novel, “Feed,” is one of the 100 most frequently banned books in this country. Ironically, given that it’s about the dangers of technology entangled with human thought, it has even been banned in Iowa by ChatGPT, an incident which aptly illustrates the ugly side of the book bans that have bloomed like a weed throughout this country over the last several years.
A statute passed by the Iowa legislature made it a punishable offence for school library collections to contain any books that portrayed “sexual situations,” a vague and flimsy rubric. Confronting lists of tens of thousands of titles in Iowa libraries, one district, Mason City, Iowa, decided to make the job of culling collections easier by asking ChatGPT which books should be removed. Nineteen were selected. “Feed” was one, though the closest it comes to “sexual situations” is a scene where two people don’t have sex. Apparently, bad sex is still too good for Iowa.
More concerningly, most of the other titles on that list were books that dealt, not in salacious scenarios, but in discussions of the trauma of sexual abuse. It’s notable that there was a strong emphasis on established classics by African American women: Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” These titles were prominent on the list, as well as things like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the famously sizzling-hot “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser. Only two or three of the nineteen books ChatGPT suggested should be removed from the shelves actually contained scenes that might be considered titillating – if banning that kind of thing, in fact, is what the legislation was really trying to accomplish.
This list from Iowa sums up a lot of the intellectual dangers of contemporary censorship: With an air of misplaced moral hysteria, it expunges recognized classics of American literature, books that speak to many young people of the things they have lived through – and for those who haven’t lived through some of these things, these books open a door for new understanding.
These books are classics because they’re stories of American resilience. But instead of making them available to teens who might find solace or understanding through them, the Iowa legislation sent a different message, a message of silence. Whatever has happened to you, keep quiet about it. Hide yourself and your experiences. It creates, in effect, a conspiracy of silence that descends from the governor’s mansion downwards through the state’s institutions, and, finally, clamps a hand across the mouth of kids themselves.
It of course is the icing on the cake that the list was compiled by ChatGPT, a notoriously unreliable source which demonstrates precisely the dangers of a republic of ignorance, the abrogation of intellectual responsibility to glib corporate devices.
As Thomas Jefferson frequently argued, an educated and informed electorate is absolutely necessary for a democratic republic. Without citizens who understand the world, a democracy will fail. It will stumble into blind autocracy and dictatorship. Access to books and libraries are central to the American project, our shared future.
So that kid reading books forty years ago in that little turreted, brick library in Stow urges the Massachusetts legislature to stand up for knowledge, for freedom, and for truth. This is what America is supposed to be about.
The writer is author of “Feed,” a National Book Award finalist and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction finalist.
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M.T. Anderson to Mass. legislature: Support free expression
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Free speech, knowledge of history, and even scientific inquiry are currently under attack in this country. Massachusetts has always been a leading light in American thought, a center of learning. At the moment, the Massachusetts legislature is considering an Act Regarding Free Expression, which would protect librarians as they work to provide the keys to knowledge and self-understanding, with access for all.
I became a reader in the small, then-rural town of Stow, Massachusetts, haunting its red-brick, Victorian library and its school libraries. I remember, as a kid, scanning the library cards in the books I checked out, running through the names of previous readers who’d read that book stretching back decades, long before I was born, a lineage of learning. In that little town we could still read books that took us to far corners of time and space. We could learn about the world around us – and how we fit into that world.
Now I’m an author. My satirical science fiction novel, “Feed,” is one of the 100 most frequently banned books in this country. Ironically, given that it’s about the dangers of technology entangled with human thought, it has even been banned in Iowa by ChatGPT, an incident which aptly illustrates the ugly side of the book bans that have bloomed like a weed throughout this country over the last several years.
A statute passed by the Iowa legislature made it a punishable offence for school library collections to contain any books that portrayed “sexual situations,” a vague and flimsy rubric. Confronting lists of tens of thousands of titles in Iowa libraries, one district, Mason City, Iowa, decided to make the job of culling collections easier by asking ChatGPT which books should be removed. Nineteen were selected. “Feed” was one, though the closest it comes to “sexual situations” is a scene where two people don’t have sex. Apparently, bad sex is still too good for Iowa.
More concerningly, most of the other titles on that list were books that dealt, not in salacious scenarios, but in discussions of the trauma of sexual abuse. It’s notable that there was a strong emphasis on established classics by African American women: Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” These titles were prominent on the list, as well as things like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and the famously sizzling-hot “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser. Only two or three of the nineteen books ChatGPT suggested should be removed from the shelves actually contained scenes that might be considered titillating – if banning that kind of thing, in fact, is what the legislation was really trying to accomplish.
This list from Iowa sums up a lot of the intellectual dangers of contemporary censorship: With an air of misplaced moral hysteria, it expunges recognized classics of American literature, books that speak to many young people of the things they have lived through – and for those who haven’t lived through some of these things, these books open a door for new understanding.
These books are classics because they’re stories of American resilience. But instead of making them available to teens who might find solace or understanding through them, the Iowa legislation sent a different message, a message of silence. Whatever has happened to you, keep quiet about it. Hide yourself and your experiences. It creates, in effect, a conspiracy of silence that descends from the governor’s mansion downwards through the state’s institutions, and, finally, clamps a hand across the mouth of kids themselves.
It of course is the icing on the cake that the list was compiled by ChatGPT, a notoriously unreliable source which demonstrates precisely the dangers of a republic of ignorance, the abrogation of intellectual responsibility to glib corporate devices.
As Thomas Jefferson frequently argued, an educated and informed electorate is absolutely necessary for a democratic republic. Without citizens who understand the world, a democracy will fail. It will stumble into blind autocracy and dictatorship. Access to books and libraries are central to the American project, our shared future.
So that kid reading books forty years ago in that little turreted, brick library in Stow urges the Massachusetts legislature to stand up for knowledge, for freedom, and for truth. This is what America is supposed to be about.
The writer is author of “Feed,” a National Book Award finalist and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction finalist.
Like this:
Related Stories
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.