Burning the Libraries

Forget about the psychotic politics for a minute. Sure, you’re going to help suffering children in Gaza by vandalizing your college library and harassing your Jewish classmates while everyone else is frantically studying for finals. Sure, you’re going to reverse generations worth of social change that you didn’t care for by banning and removing all the bad books in your library that encouraged that change in the first place. Only, you’ll have to go back quite a bit to make sure you get out all the bad stuff. Like, all the way back to the surviving literature of classical antiquity, which was written by heathens and therefore, does not bear the stamp of approval of your local Hard-Ass Hellfire Church.

Put that loud nonsense aside, I say. What we really have here is a civilization consuming itself from within. The simplistic story we used to tell ourselves was that “barbarians” sacked libraries because they couldn’t read the books in them, and that made them angry and afraid. What, then, shall we say about the postmodern domestic barbarians who do the same thing? Can half-educated college students who don’t have the patience to read any books, and churchgoers who show up at county council meetings having read nothing but the Bible, while somehow skipping all the bits to do with love and forgiveness, understand what it is they are destroying? Or do the silent mysteries of the stacks make them angry and afraid? What monasteries shall preserve the hard-won wisdom of centuries today, when the libraries are gutted and the online repositories hidden and censored by fascist…