Regarding censorship and bowdlerizing older books etc. —
Correcting errors is necessary to present a better book and is not censorship or bowdlerizing. Copyediting is entirely ethical, and improves the work.
It is not ethical to change published work. If you don’t like a given book, don’t read it. Better yet, try to write a better one. Altering past work to conform to contemporary mores is ridiculous. It’s akin to the hare-brained plan to remove all the scenes with smoking from 1940s Noir movies. To what end? To protect people from seeing others smoking? Absurd. Also, be it noted that showing an old film with lots of smoking in it in no way whatsoever promotes or condones such a practice. It’s simply a record of how things were. Further, worse, as Orwell’s 1984 depicted, rewriting history and expunging any fact not approved hourly by a fascist regime is how they steal from us our heritage, replacing it with their ideology.
You don’t expunge racist hate by removing all mention of the KKK. Quite the contrary, as disgusting and infuriating as it may be, only the open acknowledgement of all the facts, appalling and despicable, can keep us from being led by haters into repeating the crimes and horrors of the past. We must remember the bad and own the past taints in order to avoid them in the future, in order to do better.
There is no such things as Positive Censorship.
Education, context, cognizance is necessary. When I was in fourth grade our teacher brought in a town cop dressed in full KKK regalia. He stood silently in front of us for five minutes, then left. We were told, “I just wanted you to know they’re still out there, protecting us.” Most of the kids didn’t know what had just happened, but I’d recognized both the KKK costume and the cop inside it — I spotted his voice trousers, which had a dark stripe down the outside of the leg, and his shoes. I knew the guy.
Anyway, I trudged to the public library after school let out and borrowed books on the KKK, to confirm that what we’d been shown was in fact evil, or at least dark. When the librarian tried to tell me I was too young to borrow such material, my mother marched in later that evening and read her the riot act, defending my right to read any book I wished and to inform myself on any topic that interested me. Brava for her, a great person, small as she was.
Incidentally, it was in fourth grade, same teacher, that racist geography texts taught us patronizing, condescending stereotypes such as Bunga of the Jungle and Nanook of the North. In later years such books would be taken out of curricula, but my town was in a backward region where old shibboleths prevailed. Even at the time most of us kids squirmed about those books and their antiquated depictions of various cultures. It was all very White Man’s Burden sort of thing, and disgusted those among us who had friends from all manner of cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
Was it harmful? To some, probably, but most of us exposed to it quickly saw it for the remnant chunk of out-dated hate it was and moved on. Most? Well, some of us, I guess, given that my home town and environs remains a place of shrieking fear, greed, and hate amidst economic decay. So, no, I don’t think learning how older people or older times thought and acted was a bad thing, and while removing the racist texts improved education, forgetting that kind of mental illness is a denial and a hiding of past crimes, a lie.
Look at current attempts by the TX school book committees, who control content, or by FL Governor DeSantis, and too many other far-right types, to remove from history all mention of the horrors committed in past times to benefit our contemporary hegemony and culture. History is His Story if He is a Rich White Male, in their warped view, and acknowledging racist genocide, sexist cruelty, and so on can’t be tolerated, lest their Hollywood Myth of Manifest Destiny become more wobbly than it’s always been.
That’s where books come in. Yes, you’ll find asides, passages, and full-book attitudes that strike modern readers as racist, misogynist, and hateful. In some cases, the writers were bigots, yes. In other books, received wisdom and unexamined social stances seeped into the work without malice on the part of the writer, who might be characterized as unaware.
Again, if a work, any kind of art, offends you, avoid it. Suppressing it only makes YOU into the fascist. Censorship is always futile and repugnant to cultured people. To defy and counter negative words, positive words are required. Shouting down or muzzling only creates higher pressure that builds until it explodes in a backlash. Words are water and water doesn’t compress.
To bowdlerize any work, be it removing words, rewriting passages, or hiding the penises and pubic hair on statues behind a carved fig leaf, is philistine thuggery. Burning books and destroying art carries such anti-intellectual hatred of art and culture to the logical extremes of pure madness.
The Fig Leaf Campaign arose from the Council of Trent in 1563 C.E., with each succeeding Pope joining in the defacing of art on homophobic and anti-sex grounds, until Pope Pius IX in 1857 ordered all statues of nudes destroyed, which led to statue penises being broken off and, strangely, not destroyed but hoarded in the Vatican. A room few would want to enter …
A state of mindless dismissal of human values few would wish to experience, the sort of actions only tyrants engage in.
Seems I stand foursquare against censorship and bowdlerizing in favor of tolerance, rational avoidance of what bothers, and assessments of art and literature based on long-term cultural context, not the strident shrieking of phony moral crusaders from this or any era.
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