i was making a point to a co-worker about banned books and browsed to the american library association’s guide on the subject.
in their introductory essay for the idea of intellectual freedom, they included this really great quote:
In his book Free Speech for Me—But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other, Nat Hentoff writes that “the lust to suppress can come from any direction.” He quotes Phil Kerby, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times, as saying, “Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second.”
source: ala.org
thinking on that idea, current reading and recent events got me to musing.
musing
inspired by her contribution to bill moyer’s miniseries on faith and reason, i’ve started listening to margaret atwood’s the handmaid’s tale during my commute to work.
it is striking that such a tale of a totalitarian society should mirror other dystopic works:
and even
(though i must confess that my only contact with this material is the movie version by the wachowski brothers; i’ll have to correct this, soon)
much farther down the literary food chain is
is this how we envision ourselves? does our current march toward the right—for moves to the right are never described as “lackadaisical,”—really look as bleak as this? is it inevitable that such a future requires a ring of religiosity to it? do we realise that a “democratic” middle east will likely look like these?
anti-distopia
i’ve been meaning to write my personal manifesto as to why i do not like religion anymore. have touched on it, a bit here and there. i’ve been meaning on marking my discoveries from apostolic to apostate, but today’s not that day.
(image by karen spector)
as a reference and primer, i will link to this amazing interview with sam harris, author of the end of faith: religion, terror, and the future of reason on truthdig.com
[interviewer]What is the most likely way that American society, if not the rest of the world, will eventually abandon irrational faith?
[Harris] I think this is a war of ideas that has to be fought on a hundred fronts at once. There’s not one piece that is going to trump all others.
But I think we should not underestimate the power of embarrassment. . . . Once you lift the taboo around criticizing faith and demand that people start talking sense, then the capacity for making religious certitude look stupid will be exploited, and we’ll start laughing at people who believe the things that the Tom DeLays, the Pat Robertsons of the world believe. We’ll laugh at them in a way that will be synonymous with excluding them from our halls of power.
source: truthdig.com(identifying tags are mine, for clarity–ed)
i look back at that quote, the one about the urge to censor, and wonder, is this why people have children? to be the censor over someone?
I read “The Handmaid’s Tale” about ten years ago, so my memory is not up to debating any given idea tit for tat. What I do remember, as you’ve alluded to, is the idea of religious practice being curtailed, at the higher levels, by simple will to dominate, or government. And in that alone, I agree with the other novels that you’ve compared this one with.
Must the future be so dystopian? Yes an no. If we can learn to exist in a relative vacuum of peace (as a country), we may exceed our liberal expectations. Note: I don’t necessarily see this as a good thing. Or, we may find ourselves in some future crisis in which human nature drives us toward ridiculous primitive belief, in which case liberalism will be readily sacrificed at the alter of “the most good for the most people”. Again, a bad thing.
Did I say yes or no? Upon further reflection, I would be inclined to say that whatever the future holds, it will likely be too much of something. And either direction, to an extreme, is bad.