Freedom of Thought

An interesting discussion about burning books came up in the discussion thread on my recent post reviewing Chesterton's biography of Thomas Aquinas.  Chesterton concludes the biography with a scene, meant to chill the reader's blood, of Martin Luther ordering the books of Thomas Aquinas burned.  I agreed that it was "very wicked" to burn books, and in saying that, I was just repeating the schoolbook commonsense, or orthodoxy, of liberal-democratic late-20th-century America.  Hitler's book burnings are one of the signposts of the evil of that regime in popular mythology; book burning has been tacitly anathematized, and those anathemas are part of the identity of every civic-minded American.

But is burning books really wrong, and if so, why?  Burning books is not in the list of common crimes alongside murder, theft, rape, and assault.  If it were discovered that a person was trying to buy up every available copy of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, and burn it, it wouldn't, as far as I know, be grounds for prosecuting him.  Of course, such an endeavor would have no hope of success: at most, it would succeed in pushing up the price of the book which would just induce more printing, and in any case it would be against the policy of libraries to surrender their copies for any money.  If one really hopes to extinguish the existence of a certain text, then, it's probably necessary to engage in a good deal of coercion and theft/confiscation, and indeed of violence against individuals who try to reproduce the texts to replace the copies that are destroyed.  That might be a reason that book burning is wicked, or at least symptomatic of wickedness: anyone who burns books with the idea of destroying their contents probably must engage in coercion, theft, violence, etc., to achieve his ends.

Would it be wrong to destroy a text through pure moral suasion?  Suppose a nonprofit organization were to be founded, dedicated to the proposition that Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto had done so much evil in the world that it ought to be  expunged from human memory forever, but that it was wrong (perhaps even Marxist) to seize anyone's property, so the nonprofit would restrict its efforts to moral suasion, encouraging individuals to burn their personal copies of the iniquitous book, while simultaneously opposing any government policy that would suppress the book by force.  In this case, I think the nonprofit's objective would be wrong, but they would be partly redeemed by the quixotic innocence of their methods (and non-threatening because of the near-certainty of their failure).  Or let us return to the case suggested above: a wealthy individual tries to buy up every copy of The Communist Manifesto and burn it.  Here I think we need to know if the wealthy individual seeks this end openly or covertly.  If covertly, I think he is in the wrong (though probably not legally culpable) because those who part with their copies of the book are a bit deceived: they think they will be able to buy another copy later, and don't realize they are giving up access to the text forever.  If openly, the wealthy individual's action resembles that of the nonprofit, with a small difference: since he is using money rather than moral suasion, he may be corrupting people into going against their own consciences to deprive posterity of a historic text for their own short-term gain.  In any of these cases, one of the losers (in the unlikely event that the attempt succeeds) is posterity; another, perhaps, is the contemporary non-Communist Manifesto-owning public, who will have their choices diminished and live in an impoverished discourse environment. 

But am I assuming that the existence of the text is beneficial?  Not exactly.  Some regard it as a benefit, others as a nuisance, others are indifferent.  Is it meaningful to say that some book's harms outweigh its benefits, in the face of these differing preferences?  If it is meaningful, who is qualified to judge?  I certainly know what answer I want to give, indeed to insist on and demand from others: No one.  But how do you prove that?  Yet that may be a secondary point, because I'm not arguing chiefly from a utilitarian point of view.  My intuition is that burning books is wrong even if it yields net benefits, or rather that a utilitarian calculus is never feasible but our anti-book-burning scruples should be independent of our estimates of net costs and benefits.

Burning books may not cause anyone physical pain, but it is nonetheless a sort of violence to both authors and potential readers. To authors, it is a destruction of their labor.  The foundation of property rights is labor: a man naturally owns, in the first place, himself, and in the second place, the fruits of his labor.  This moral intuition is not always easy to apply in practice, but when someone labors to make a text, the destruction of that text is a destruction of the author's labors and in a sense of the author himself.  To potential readers, it is the permanent denial of the satisfaction of a desire. It is a sort of indirect violence to starve a man, to deprive him of his ability to satisfy his desire for food.  In the same way, it is a sort of violence to deprive a man of his ability to satisfy his desire to read Thomas Aquinas.  That doesn't mean we're obligated to subsidize a man's food, or to copy parchments of Aquinas for him.  But if we deliberately bar his way to the baker's shop, we are in the wrong.  In the same way, we are in the wrong if we take Thomas Aquinas from all the libraries and burn them.

It will be replied that reading Thomas Aquinas is a less compelling need than food.  Maybe.  But reading Thomas Aquinas, or rather, seeking the truth, which may entail reading Thomas Aquinas for someone who is convinced that Aquinas sheds light on the truth, is a loftier need than food; it is just as necessary to the realization of a man's highest nature; and not only would some men go without food (if necessary) to read texts that contain truth, but it is precisely the best man, and every man if he were better, who would be willing to endure hunger for the sake of enlightenment.  And in starving a man you deprive him for a time, but, if he lives, he may eat again in the future.  But in burning a book you deprive a man, indeed all men, of the satisfaction of a desire forever.  This is why it is in a way even wickeder, more paradigmatically evil, to burn a book than to starve a man.  Starve a man, even to death, you have only killed one man.  Burn a book and you have killed all men a little.

One reason to preserve books we disagree with is that a proper humility demands that, not perhaps that we continually doubt what we hold to be true-- there are some beliefs one finds it impossible really to doubt, and others that one has studied carefully and found to be well-founded-- but that what we now reject as falsehood might have truths in it that we failed to understand.  Another is that errors serve as cautionary tales.  A problem in science is that usually only the results of successful experiments are published; experiments that fail are less likely to make it into journals, and therefore are likely to be repeated. ("He who does not know his own history is condemned to repeat it.") More subtly, we can put a new spin on Churchill's dictum about truth needing "a bodyguard of lies."  He was talking about the necessity of speaking guardedly in a time of war, but the words might have another meaning: it is often impossible to understand and/or appreciate the truth fully without seeing the errors to which it is the alternative.  Orthodoxy is clarified by being distinguished from heresy. 

And yet I think I'm still missing the point...  For burning books is not merely imprudent or self-defeating, nor merely a form of theft; it is also, I feel, a sort of lying.  It is like the mistress who hangs up when the wife answers the phone: you are trying to prevent people from reaching a conclusion which they would reach if they had a fuller information set, and that is to say you are deceiving them.  I feel that many of those who burn books have a sort of bad faith about them.  A crude but approximately true description of why Hitler burned books is that he wanted to make the German people stupid so that they would be more easily deceived by his lies; and I suspect that applies to all of history's book burners.  You don't burn books if you can win the argument.  You burn books if you know deep down that you are losing the argument, and you don't want to admit that you were wrong, perhaps because you have already bloodied your hands for the cause and to admit you were wrong would make you nothing but a murderer.  Maybe this is an over-generalization, and the Christian church anyway is a partial exception because it is profoundly concerned with teaching the broad masses and it is true that false texts can lead a student astray even if in the long run the exercise of refuting them would teach the student better than reading the true texts alone ever could.  Yet even when an admixture of good intentions motivates men to burn books it turns them into liars.

Societies that lack free thought go mad.  In the absence of free thought, even truth becomes falsehood.  Without their "bodyguard of lies," truths of vast profundity and power that crowned the labors of generations of philosophers turn into cant, almost meaningless phrases, murmured like fetishes, guiltily disbelieved in by thinking people. Even those who decide to believe under such circumstances believe for lying reasons, by "faith" defined as doublethink.  What is so terrifying about the Spanish Inquisition is not how bloody it was but how bloody it wasn't: by estimates I've seen it cost only a few thousand lives over more than three centuries, yet it so decimated the intellectual life of Spain that for a long time that country, once Europe's leading power, ceased almost to be recognizably European, so backward was it, so excluded from the life and energies of Europe by its intellectual and spiritual darkness.  The Soviet Union under Stalin was three orders of magnitude more murderous, yet there is a sense it which that seems almost a footnote; for the "mindslaughter" (as historian Robert Conquest calls it) was thesame, and in the wake of the mindslaughter the populace was helpless against mass murder because it was helpless to  think. The Spanish crown, as it happened, never decided to murder millions of Spaniards, as Stalin decided to murder millions of Russians, but had it decided to do so, there could have been little resistance.

Comments

[Nato]

A fascinating analysis.

[Troy Camplin, Ph.D.]

Certainly nowadays a good book burning would get you a spike in sales. What I wouldn't give to have my works burned some day!