What They Fear Most Is Your Mind

.Since time before history, humans have told stories. Whispered around campfires, in songs, inked by monks in echoing monasteries and, later, printed into pamphlets, people have shared their stories of warning, wisdom, prophecy, heritage and hope. Our stories have taught us who we’ve been, what we’ve learned and they invite us to imagine who we might yet become.

Trinity College library, Dublin

Reading does much more than entertain us; it educates us by exercising our moral imagination. Every unfamiliar character enables us to step into another’s life and see the world with a different perspective. It gives us the chance to safely sample another’s experience, almost first-hand but without the danger. Every difficult memoir asks us to hold different, maybe competing, truths in our minds at once and this is how empathy grows. This is how judgement matures. In short, this is how we learn. Stories don’t simply fill our shelves for fun; they help us choose who we become.

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Perhaps that’s why presidents, tyrants and those who seek absolute power have so often feared writers. A writer hasn’t got an army or throne and most have no wealth worth conquering; writers have only words, yet history shows, again and again, that words are among the first things an authoritarian tries to silence.

Good literature and honest memoirs refuse to cheat and reduce humanity. They allow heroes to fail, villains to love, ordinary people to be brave or odd, and are a place where binary certainty gives way to doubt. They ask more questions than they provide answers for. This makes them difficult to control because they offer an alternative viewpoint, a grown-up, complicated view that may clash with the one we’ve previously held.

Authoritarianism prefers simpler stories, uncomplicated heroes, unquestioned leaders and clean, approved versions of the past. It presents facts that are easy for us to digest and align with the worldview we already hold. Complexity however, leaves room for independent thought, and independent thought is difficult to govern. Compare the difference between managing the behaviour of a group of university politics students to a group of seven-year-olds, ie, a group of well-informed readers to a group that is naive. When only approved stories remain, our capacity for independent thought, withers.

History offers us the same lesson:

• 1984 was once controversial and is now widely recognised as prophetic.

• The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank) reminds us that even a child’s testimony can become threatening to those who fear uncomfortable truths. 

• Whether it is Beloved or The Grapes of Wrath, works that challenge society have often become part of its moral inheritance.

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But what one person fears, another treasures. Censorship says more about the anxieties of a person or an era than it does about the writing itself and this is why censorship is much more than the removal of books. It’s about people, memory and the erosion of culture.

Books remember what individuals or governments wish to be forgotten. They preserve the voices of paupers and queens. They keep languages alive, preserve customs, share injustices, inspire revolutions and remember remarkable acts of courage. To erase a book is to erase a thread in the tapestry of our collective memory. When enough threads disappear, history itself unravels and that affects our ability to move healthily into the future without repeating the same mistakes.

Writers have never possessed armies but what we do possess is, perhaps, hopefully, more enduring. We preserve questions. We refuse easy certainty. We remind one another that every human being contains contradictions, and that no government, church, institution or regime has ever succeeded in reducing humanity to a single approved story for very long.

To ban a book is to burn knowledge, vision, rebellion and warning. Every book, every testimony, is a fragment of what it is to be a human. Some comfort us, others disturb us, some challenge us even before we understand why but together, stories are a conversation that stretch across cultures and millennia.

Freedom of expression is a lot more than the freedom to publish, it’s the freedom to remember, question and change. It’s the freedom to learn from others, to build bridges of understanding and compassion, to grow into a better future. Stories outlive censorship because truth survives long after the people who try to bury it. But it still needs protecting, it needs us to read freely and well.

Censorship has never been about books. It has always been about people.

With love,

Jen 💜