The backfire

From the Spectacular Backfire department, today we have: the guy who sponsored a bill to crack down on "pornographic and inappropriate" materials in public school classrooms in Utah has stated that he needs to "revisit" the wording of the law when a school district used it to remove Bibles from elementary and junior high school libraries.

Representative Ken Ivory (R-West Jordan) was alarmed at the unintended consequences of his bill, and held a rally of "faith and conservative" groups at the State Capitol this week, where protestors held signs saying "God cannot be cancelled" and "Remove porn, not the Bible."

"Is there any artistic value to the Bible?" Ivory asked the crowd.  "Has anyone been to Rome and visited the Sistine Chapel?  Has anyone also been to Paris and in the Louvre, seen The Last Supper?  Or have you been to Florence and seen the sculpture of the David?"

Which is an interesting example to choose, because it was people of precisely the same mindset who, just three months ago, got a school principal in Tallahassee fired for showing fifth graders a photograph of Michelangelo's David.

But hypocrisy, however blatant, never seems to register with these people.  Apparently, material is inappropriate whenever they say it is, and might well be appropriate tomorrow if the context changes.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Amandajm, Bible Johns Gospel 3 16, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The deeper problem is, it doesn't take much searching to find parts of the Bible that are inappropriate for children.  I mean, really inappropriate.  One of the best-known examples is Ezekiel 23:20-21: "There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.  So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled."

Then there's Genesis 19, which is not just about sex, but about drunken incest:

Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains—for he was afraid to stay in Zoar—where they lived in a cave.  One day the older daughter said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man in the land to sleep with us, as is the custom over all the earth.  Come, let us get our father drunk with wine so we can sleep with him and preserve his line.”

So that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the firstborn went in and slept with her father; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.

The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Look, I slept with my father last night.  Let us get him drunk with wine again tonight so you can go in and sleep with him and we can preserve our father’s line.”

So again that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.

Thus both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father.  The older daughter gave birth to a son and named him Moab.  He is the father of the Moabites of today.  The younger daughter also gave birth to a son, and she named him Ben-ammi.  He is the father of the Ammonites of today.

And don't even get me started about the Song of Solomon.

The trouble is, people like Ken Ivory want one standard for Christian texts and a different standard for everything else.  A kids' story about a child with gay parents?  Oh, no, can't have that, it's inappropriate.  But a text that features lots of sex (consensual and not), violence, torture, and genocide -- that's just fine, because "God cannot be cancelled."

If he, and the others like him, want to have an honest conversation about what is and is not appropriate to have available to schoolchildren, that's just fine.  I don't know of a single person -- liberal or conservative, religious or not -- who wants to expose children to material that is unsuited to their personal and emotional development, and no one argues that young children should read explicitly sexual or violent books.

But you can't just set a standard, then when it's applied to your favorite book, say, "No, wait, not like that."

So as usual, it's not the idea behind the law that's the problem, here; it's the hypocrisy of its supporters.

Something I don't suppose Ken Ivory will understand.  People who specialize in performative virtue seldom do.  But maybe another biblical quote, from Matthew chapter 6, will strike home with him more clearly, something Jesus said about making a show of being holy: "When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men… but when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray in secret, to your Father who is unseen."

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The muzzle

The first people targeted by political ideologues are almost always the artists, authors, poets, and other creatives.

No other group has a way of striking at the soul the way these people do; often with one single image or turn of phrase they point out with blinding clarity the hypocrisy and ugliness of the people in power.  No wonder they're suppressed -- sometimes violently.  Faced with depictions of nudity or sexuality, one man said:

It is not the mission of art to wallow in filth for filth's sake, to paint the human being only in a state of putrefaction, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, or to present deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength...  [We will see to it that] works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the people.

Another commented, "Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists."

Make no mistake; book bans and book burnings, shutting down or defunding libraries and art exhibits, are not about protecting children from age-inappropriate material.  There is an honest discussion to be had about what is appropriate for children to learn about at what age, and no one -- liberal or conservative -- disputes that point.  This, however, goes way beyond that.

The people doing this don't want anyone, anywhere, to have access to books or art that runs against the straight White Christian agenda.  So the first to go are creative works by or about minorities, anything dealing openly with sexuality, and anything that even mentions LGBTQ+ people; i.e., anything labeled "degenerate."  It's not like the goal isn't obvious, especially with regards to sexuality.  "All things which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual," said one government official, "but signify the life and death of the nation."

And once that kind of thing gets started, it gets whipped into a frenzy, because the people doing it honestly believe they're fighting evil.  One witness to a book burning said the following:

I held my breath while he hurled the first volume into the flames: it was like burning something alive.  Then students followed with whole armfuls of books, while schoolboys screamed into the microphone their condemnations of this and that author, and as each name was mentioned the crowd booed and hissed.  You felt the venom behind their denunciations.  Children of fourteen mouthing abuse.

Creative people can fight back, but once the works are destroyed, in some sense it's too late.  One author, more optimistic than I am, said, "History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas.  Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.  You can burn my books and the books of the best minds... but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds."

Perhaps so, but once access is stopped, you don't even have to burn the physical copies.  This is something fascists have learned all too well.  Control what people find out -- place a stranglehold on the media, and muzzle the people who dissent, especially the artists and writers -- and you're ninety percent of the way to victory.  "Those who don't read good books," said another famous author, "have no advantage over those who can't."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Alan Levine from Strawberry, United States, Book burning (3), CC BY 2.0]

The only acceptable response is to fight back.  Hard.  Especially us creative types, who are so frequently in the bullseye of the hatred.  If, as an adult, you find something offensive -- fine, don't read it.  However, passing legislation to prevent anyone else from reading it is the road to ceding control to the state over what people are allowed to see, hear, and think.  And if you don't think this is one short step from denying the personhood and right to exist of people who have an ethnicity, religion, political ideology, or sexual orientation different from the short list of ones accepted by the powers-that-be, you are being willfully blind to history.

Because -- oh, sorry, forgot to mention -- everything in this post comes from the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.  Who did you think I was talking about?

[Nota bene: the quotes are, in order, from Adolf Hitler (1937); German nationalist Max Nordau (1892); Heinrich Himmler (1937); American journalist Lilian T. Mowrer (1933); Helen Keller (1933); and Mark Twain (1895)]

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The lost catalog

After yesterday's rather elegiac post about the breadth of creative work we've lost over the ages, a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link suggesting that in some fortunate cases, maybe "lost" doesn't mean forever.

The ancients knew all too well that the vagaries of time made books and scrolls precious, easily-damaged treasures.  Fire, damage from insects and mice, and even just the wear-and-tear from repeated use all took their toll on written work.  Add to that the fact that before the invention of movable type, hand-copying manuscripts was a laborious and time-consuming occupation, and it's no wonder that books were rare and expensive, often only to be found in libraries, monasteries, and the homes of the very wealthy.

This awareness of how much could perish forever if a single library was destroyed prompted some scholars to try and catalog manuscripts, to create a record of the rich diversity of books out there in the world.  One of these was named Hernando (also known as Ferdinand) Colón, the illegitimate son of none other than Christopher Columbus.

Colón was a fascinating character.  Uninterested in his father's passion of establishing trade routes, exploration, and colonization, he preferred instead to travel around Europe and buy books.  He founded a personal library in Seville where he welcomed visits from other scholars, and at its height it contained over fifteen thousand books.  His library contained all sorts of books -- unlike many of his time, he didn't consider books by non-Christians to be worthless "works of infidels" -- and his library became one of the best-known in western Europe.

It was also unwieldy.  Imagine trying to find a particular piece of information in a library that big, with no indexing system.  Back then, there was no such thing as a card catalog, much less a search engine.  So Colón set about writing the sixteen immense volumes of Libros de los Epitomes, a bibliography and short summary of every single one of the books in the library.

It's a good thing he did, because (like the Library of Cologne I wrote about yesterday) Colón's library wasn't to last.  Besides the aforementioned hazards all books are subject to, Colón came to the attention of the narrow-minded zealous religious bigotry of the Inquisition, and a number of his books -- the ones judged to be heretical -- were seized and burned.  But by that time they had been catalogued, so we have at least a glimpse of what lay inside them.

Fourteen of the sixteen Libros were known to have survived, and reside at the Biblioteca Colombina de Sevilla, along with what is left of Colón's book collection.  But now, quite by accident, the fifteenth volume was found to be still in existence as well -- somehow it had made its way to the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen, which houses the huge book collection of eighteenth-century Icelandic scholar Árni Magnússon.  The three-thousand-odd books in the Institute have only recently been studied in any sort of detail, and it was quite a shock when Guy Lazure, of the University of Windsor (Canada), was working there and found a thirty-centimeter-thick, two thousand page book that turned out to be one of the lost volumes of the Libros de los Epitomes.

The recently rediscovered fifteenth volume of Libros de los Epitomes [Image courtesy of the Arnamagnæan Institute and the University of Copenhagen]

"It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read five hundred years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries," said Edward Wilson-Lee of Cambridge University, who wrote a biography of Colón called The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.  Wilson-Lee emphasizes that Colón was qualitatively different from other book collectors of the time, because he didn't limit his acquisitions to scholarly tomes and the classics.  "This was someone who was, in a way, changing the model of what knowledge is.  Instead of saying 'knowledge is august, authoritative things by some venerable old Roman and Greek people', he’s doing it inductively: taking everything that everyone knows and distilling it upwards from there.  It’s much more resonant with today, with big data and Wikipedia and crowdsourced information.  This is a model of knowledge that says, 'We’re going to take the breadth of print – ballads and pornography and newsletters – and not exclude that from the world of information.'"

It will be fascinating to see what lost gems of antiquity will show up -- in summary form, at least -- in the fifteenth volume of the Libros.  Not as good, perhaps, as having the actual copies as they were before they fell prey to time and the Inquisition, but far better than nothing.  At least it will give us an idea of the scope of what was lost -- and raise the hope that maybe, in other obscure collections somewhere out there, some lost masterpieces of the past are still waiting to be found.

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A library of ghosts

I'm currently working on a trilogy about the fall of civilization that is not, I hasten to state, inspired by current events.

It's actually a story I've been cogitating on since I was in college.  How would ordinary people cope with the collapse of the comfortable support network we're all so very used to?  The three books of the trilogy are set about five hundred years apart, and center around (respectively) the time when everything fell apart, a period of "Dark Ages" during which a significant chunk of what's left of humanity has lost technology and even literacy, and the time during which things come full circle and people begin to rediscover science and mathematics and all that comes with it.  In the second book, The Scattering Winds, there's a sequence when the main character comes across the mostly-intact remnants of a library from before the fall -- and is overwhelmed by the magnitude of what was lost:

"Do these books come from the Before Time?" Kallian asked in a near whisper.

Kasprit Seely nodded, looking around them at the shadowed shelves, laden with dust-covered books.  "Before the flood, you mean?  I’ve no doubt that many of them do.  During the Black Years, with the floods and the plagues, people were trying their hardest just to survive.  A lot of them didn’t, of course.  From what I’ve read, in the times before, there were a thousandfold more people than there are now, and they had ample food and living space and comfort and could spend their time reading and writing books.  But when a hundred years passes with deprivation and famine and death on your doorstep every day, a lot is forgotten.  You’ll see in some books there are numbers that I believe were some sort of system of keeping track of the passage of years.  But I’ve not been able to decipher how it’s to be read, nor how it relates to the present day.  Nowadays we simply track time by the year of the reign of the current king.  So this is the twenty-first year of the reign of High King Sweyn VII, long may he live."  Kasprit pulled a book off a shelf in the room they’d entered—the cover said The Diversity of Life by E. O. Wilson, and was adorned with a design of a brightly-colored beetle with long antennae.  He blew the dust off the top and opened the cover, flipped a couple of pages in, and rested the tip of his long index finger on a line that said, "Copyright 1992."

I thought about this scene when I came upon an article about an archaeological discovery made in 2017 in the center of the German city of Cologne.  Cologne is immensely old; it was the main settlement of the Ubii, a Germanic tribe that (unlike many of their neighbors) forged a strong and long-lasting alliance with the Romans.  Eventually, the place got so thoroughly Romanized that it was renamed Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium -- "Colony of Claudius and the Altar of the Agrippinians."  This proved to be a clumsy appellation, and it was shortened to Colonia, which is where the modern name of Cologne comes from.

Well, it turns out in the center of modern Cologne, a city with a million inhabitants, are the remnants of what used to be the Library of Colonia.  At first, it was thought that the foundation was part of a stone-walled fortification, but when the archaeologists began to discover deep niches in the walls, they realized that its purpose was something altogether different.

"It took us some time to match up the parallels – we could see the niches were too small to bear statues inside," said Dirk Schmitz, of the Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne, who participated in the research.  "But what they are are kind of cupboards for the scrolls.  They are very particular to libraries – you can see the same ones in the library at Ephesus."

The foundations of the Roman Library of Cologne [Image courtesy of the Romano-Germanic Museum of Cologne]

The library of Cologne in its heyday -- the middle of the second century C.E. -- is thought to have housed around twenty thousand scrolls, of which not a single one survives.  All that remains are the spaces they occupied, now inhabited only by the ghosts of long-gone books whose titles we'll never know.

When I read this article, I was struck with same feeling of longing and grief I get whenever I think about the Great Library of Alexandria and the other repositories of human knowledge.  It's what I tried to communicate in Kallian Dorn's character in The Scattering Winds; perhaps lost knowledge can be regained, but the creativity, hearts, and voices of the people who wrote these scrolls are gone forever.  Impermanence is part of reality, and -- in the words of the band Kansas -- "Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and sky."  But seeing the remains of this once-great library makes me mourn for what was housed there, even so.

I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way.  And if time travel is ever invented, I think the Great Libraries of Antiquity tour is going to be sold out indefinitely.

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The ideological minefield

A couple of days ago, I received an email through my author website that started out, "Are you by any chance the Gordon Bonnet who taught science at Finn Hill Junior High in 1987?"

It turned out that it was indeed from a former student of mine, from the very first year of my teaching career, who (alarmingly!) just turned fifty years old.  When I confirmed that I was the guy, he sent me a heartwarming response about how he had made a career working for the National Parks Service as a wilderness educator, and that his love of nature had in no small part been due to my being his teacher when he was in ninth grade.

This sort of thing is why teachers do what they do.  I can say from my own experience that three teachers -- my high school biology and creative writing teachers, and my college calculus professor -- changed my life in hugely positive ways.  But the glow of receiving that email from my former student was dimmed somewhat by the knowledge that if I were in college right now, I would never -- not in a million years -- choose teaching as a profession, and that's after a 32-year career that, all in all, was pleasant and successful.  Not only would I not recommend the profession to anyone, I would counsel current teachers to keep their options open about finding other ways to use their talents to make a living.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of Michael Anderson (Photographer), Children in a classroom]

The reason is that public education has been turned into an ideological minefield by self-serving demagogues, through the cold, calculated characterization of schools as supposed "hotbeds of indoctrination."  The far right has taken steps -- thus far, scarily successful ones -- to muzzle teachers, stifle their creativity, and prevent them from doing the job they were hired to do with any degree of autonomy.  

This is not a new trend.  I still remember when the New York State Department of Education launched the infamous "Common Core," twelve years ago or so, with the aim of trying to create a curriculum that guaranteed all students receive a certain standard set of information and skills.  While few would argue with that aim as an ideal, the implementation was not only chaotic, it attempted to solve the "standard curriculum" issue by forcing teachers into lockstep -- handing them scripts, each with a certain number of minutes they were to devote to particular topics.  It never went any further than English and math; fortunately for me, by the time they got to science, a lot of the momentum had fizzled, and what they gave us was nothing more than a weakly-revamped version of what we already had.

It's a good thing.  When I saw what was happening in English and math, I said -- in the middle of a faculty meeting -- "the day New York State hands me a script and expects me not to deviate from it will be my last day on the job."

You go through years of training, then undergo a rigorous vetting process wherein you have to demonstrate how creative and competent and knowledgeable you are, and then the b-b stackers in the Department of Education hand you a script to read.  It's maddening... and deeply insulting.

Since that time, it's only gotten worse.  The obvious example is the state of Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has forced teachers to dismantle or make inaccessible their classroom libraries until each book can be approved by a media specialist.  The ostensible reason is to make sure they're classroom-appropriate -- not only at the correct reading level, but that they don't have material unsuitable for the age of the student.  Just as with the Common Core, the stated goal sounds laudable enough.  Nobody's arguing for students having age-inappropriate material.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist, however, to figure out that this isn't actually about reading level.  From DeSantis's previous commitment to "anti-wokeness" there's little doubt that the whole thing is a smokescreen for what is largely an ideological move.  What likelihood do you think there is of the state-hired "media specialists" approving a book that displays LGBTQ characters in a positive light?  Or presents a realistic picture of what life was and is like for minorities, especially after his recent (successful) demand that Florida schools drop an AP African American Studies course?

The situation in Florida is that a teacher having copies of Knots on a Counting Rope (about growing up Native American) or The List of Things That Will Not Change (about a child being raised by two dads) available for students would be risking prosecution.  (Yes, both of those have already been banned in Florida schools -- along with 174 others, including the biographies of Rosa Parks, Sonia Sotomayor, Jim Thorpe, Roberto Clemente, Harvey Milk, and Jackie Robinson.  Don't even try to tell me this isn't about ideology.)

Then, a disingenuous CNN story yesterday feigned shock over the fact that in many places in the United States, there's been such a massive exodus of teachers that some schools are finding it hard to keep their doors open.  Gee whiz, I wonder why that could be?  In fact, in Florida they've recently created a "new pathway" for teaching positions to be filled by individuals who don't even have a bachelor's degree in the subject they're teaching.  The Florida Department of Education (speaking of disingenuous) not only claims this has nothing to do with the governor's anti-teacher campaign, but denies there's a teacher shortage at all.   "The purpose of this new pathway," a spokesperson said, "was to value the unique experience military service provides while simply offering additional time for these veterans to obtain a bachelor’s degree and other requirements to receive a full professional educator certification."

I'm calling bullshit on this.  Many candidates with excellent credentials are avoiding going into education, and who can blame them?  What highly-qualified individuals in their right mind would want to step into a position where they're devalued and harassed, robbed of autonomy, paid like crap, subjected to arbitrary decisions by policymakers who have never spent ten seconds in front of a group of students, and then threatened with prosecution for addressing the diversity in their own classrooms and presenting history that isn't blatantly whitewashed?  For me -- and again, I say this as a retired career educator who, by and large, had a great run -- it's a case of, "Turn and run.  Fast."

It's blatantly obvious where this is going; if you hobble educators to the point that teachers resign and public schools close, the only options for parents will be private, for-pay schools (including religious ones) where administrators have free rein to promote whatever kind of worldview they choose.  This, of course, has been the goal of the far right for as long as I can recall.  The idea of an egalitarian, even-handed public school system, where there is a set of brakes on ideologically-biased curricula, has been under fierce attack for decades.  (And it bears mention that far from being the alleged hotbeds of indoctrination the far right claims, in my thirty-plus of teaching, I only met two teachers -- one right-wing, the other left -- who honestly spent time trying to shift their students' political leanings.  Neither one, I might add, was particularly successful.  The rest of us teachers were too busy trying to get our students to reach a level of competence in our subjects to spend our time preaching politics.)

It breaks my heart to write this, but it has to be said, and said loudly.  What Ron DeSantis and others are engaging in is the classic technique of accusing the opposition of what they themselves are doing.  In this case, creating classrooms that promote a specific ideology, that turn what used to be a creative, rewarding profession into something intended to produce lockstep automata -- both the teachers and the students.

And unless things change, fast, my advice to any prospective teachers is to find some other way to help improve the world.  Because right now, the system is set up to destroy the very reasons most of us were drawn to education in the first place.

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