Summer Reading List: Banned Books Edition

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area….

Josh Landy
…continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today’s episode is generously sponsored by the Stanford Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. It’s our annual Summer Reading special: the Banned Books edition.

Josh Landy
The American Library Association says that last year 15,197 books were challenged or removed from library schools and universities. Compare that to just 273 from two years ago, it’s a record high.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, and most of the challenged or removed books deal with themes relating to race or sexuality and gender. And challenges actually come from both the right and the left.

Josh Landy
Just to be clear, we’re not talking about literal bans here. It’s not a crime to own one of these books. And if one of them has been removed from your school library, you could probably order it up, get it delivered to your house tomorrow,

Ray Briggs
Right, and when schools remove books from the curriculum, they’re not necessarily trying to ban anything. Sometimes students just want access to more contemporary books—books they think do a better job reflecting their reality.

Josh Landy
So to get us started, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to talk to some of those students. She files this report.

Holly McDede
If you want to feel good about the state of America’s education system, stay away from YouTube videos of school board meetings about book banning,

VA School Board
I’m sure we’ve got hundreds of people out there that would like to see those books before we burn them.

Holly McDede
In this one from Virginia School Board members appeared really passionate about the power and sway of literature.

VA School Board
just so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.

Holly McDede
This isn’t the 1940s or 50s—this was 2021. The school board had directed staff to begin removing “sexually explicit books” from library shelves. And it’s not just happening in a small community in Virginia. More books are being banned in the US than ever before. Here’s a TV ad from the 2021 Virginia governor’s race.

VA ad
As a parent, it’s tough to catch everything. So when my son showed me his reading assignment, my heart sunk. It was some of the most explicit material you can imagine. I met with lawmakers. They couldn’t believe what I was showing that

Holly McDede
The mother in this ad is talking about Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” a book assigned in her son’s AP English literature class. Many of the books parents wanted banned featured LGBTQ themes or characters or dealt with racism. What was happening in Burbank, California in 2020 was different. The students involved in that effort just wanted a more equitable and up to date curriculum.

Destiny Helliger
We were just saying that our curriculum needed a shift in that to update it, so that our curriculum reflects the world that we live in today.

Holly McDede
Destiny Helliger is a student at the Burbank Unified School District. She said this push to reshape the curriculum started with “Romeo and Juliet.” This was during a time when people in the district were worried about suicides.

Destiny Helliger
So we decided to put a pause on “Romeo and Juliet.” Later on, “Romeo and Juliet” came back. And some families of color in our district decided that a lot of the books that contain the N-word could have that same effect on students of color and that these books were negatively impacting the mental health of students, so maybe we should just take a pause to reevaluate them.

Holly McDede
Some people were really upset that the superintendent was looking to take books out of the curriculum like “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Finn Krol
It was just tense. It was incredibly tense. And there were a lot of people who didn’t want to give up what they thought.

Holly McDede
That’s Finn Krol, another student at the school. He says teachers aren’t always equipped or trained to explain why certain words are harmful. Finn is often the only transgender person in the room, he’s had to educate classmates about a homophobic slur during a discussion on “Catcher in the Rye.”

Finn Krol
The first time I read about a trans person in a classroom wasn’t even from a school curriculum. It was from my own research, and the fact that I was 14 before I even heard the word transgender is disappointing, because that is who I am and who I always will be and why I’m proud to be and that should have been reflected in our curriculum.

Holly McDede
The school district did end up taking certain classics out of the curriculum, but students also wanted the district to add newer, more contemporary books. Destiny and Finn say so far, they’re disappointed.

Destiny Helliger
I was able to start the Destiny Education Project because I wanted to start putting some more action to where I wasn’t seeing action.

Holly McDede
The Destiny Education Project is a BIPOC-led organization that aims to improve the American school system. She also started a peer-to-peer reading group.

Destiny Helliger
I think my first experience there, it made me really emotional because I had never read a book in elementary school where there was a black character in it. And then I was reading this book called “I Am Every Good Thing,” where the main character is a young black boy. And I saw one of the students and he just like, gasped, and he was like, “Oh my God, that character looks just like me!”

Holly McDede
As for Finn, he recommends the book “Both Sides Now,” about a transgender boy on the debate team who discovers that some things, like who you are and who you love, are not up for debate. And yet, here we are. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J.McDede

Josh Landy
Thanks very much, Holly for that report from the frontlines. You know, I gotta say, right, Toni Morrison is one of my favorite authors. I teach her every single year, I just find it astonishing to hear a parent in Virginia say, I don’t want my son reading “Beloved.”

Ray Briggs
Yeah, you know, some parents didn’t just complain. In 2020, a school board in California voted to actually ban another one of Toni Morrison novels, “The Bluest Eye.” And the same thing happened this year in Wentzville, Missouri—”The Bluest Eye” got pulled from the library.

Josh Landy
Yeah I remember that. I mean, okay, they relented after an outcry. But still, why on earth do they want to ban in the first place?

Ray Briggs
Well, I bet our first guess we’ll have some thoughts about that. Paula Moya is professor of English at Stanford University and the author of “The Social Imperative,” which is a book about Toni Morrison among other authors. So we asked her why she thinks that school boards want to ban “The Bluest Eye.”

Paula Moya
What’s interesting is often the ostensible reason is because it treats some, you know, the situations that are really troubling, like child sexual abuse. But I actually think that there’s much more animus, if you will, toward the racial politics of her books. And how pointed she is about talking about the history of slavery in our country, the history of racialized violence in our country. And so I can imagine that if I held some of that ideology myself, I wouldn’t really want my children reading it, because it might teach them something different than what I believed.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, she’s incredible. She’s incredible at everything, but among other things, at telling the bleak history of America’s racial past, which she does, in incredible ways. Well, throughout her novels, including in “A Mercy,” which is a novel that you really turned me on to Paula, you’ve written brilliantly about it. And that’s a, that’s an all that takes us back to a moment in sort of pre American history. When, when slavery is just about to be racialized, and, and you can imagine someone of the current, let’s not have our children learn anything that might upset their delicate sensibilities. Framework thinking, Well, gee, I don’t I don’t want my my child to learn about the truth of American history. Do you think that’s what’s underlying this?

Paula Moya
I do. And I get some of that idea from the really intense reaction, for instance, to the 1619 project that the New York Times published. Now, you know, I have my own issues with every version of history, because oftentimes, any version of history tends to be very partial, or very targeted to a specific group. So I’m not saying that that was perfect. But it was really important for setting some of the record straight about, you know, what made our early America, you know, even before it was America, so but there was such an intense reaction on to that project, that it makes me realize that some people just don’t want to hear about prehistory and slavery here in the in the United States.

Ray Briggs
So one thing I think is like really powerful in “The Bluest Eye” is this figure of Dick and Jane. These are ideal, kind of implicitly white American family of characters that she’s just kind of taking apart. Yeah, like the characters in the novel who are more realistic than Dick and Jane don’t really live up to this ideal and can’t.

Paula Moya
Well, you know, one of the really interesting things is that Toni Morrison starts out “The Bluest Eye” with the kind of Dick and Jane narrative. And so, you know, those of us who say, my generation grew up with these readers that introduced us to the characters of Dick and Jane, who are these prototypically white American, you know, middle class, you know, mother, father, brother, sister, dog, cat kind of world. And she starts out with a conventional orthographic you know, story of Dick and Jane and everybody being very happy and working out very well. And then in the next One, it’s the same words the same story. But with all the punctuation removed. And then in the next iteration, it’s the same story, the same words, but with all the spaces and punctuation removed, so that it becomes very frantic, even in the visual aspect of looking at the Dick and Jane story. So it has this emotional impact on the reader, that de-familiarizes that Dick and Jane story for us.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s fantastic. I mean, she’s always doing these incredible things with it the second half of “Beloved,” it’s also just a brilliant tour de force of literary fireworks, but not just, of course, for their own sake, not just for fun, not just for aesthetic power, but they really hit you right in the gut.

Paula Moya
Well, that’s exactly right. And, you know, it’s often this idea that what we’re so familiar with that we don’t question it, we don’t ask about it, we don’t see it as strange. And so she has this way in her writing, of making what seems ought to be familiar to us strange—that makes us then question it. So starting out right at the very beginning of that novel, to make strange or to de-familiarize, that kind of prototypical, happy white middle class family makes us then shift our thinking, or our perception a little bit into seeing the story that she’s about to tell us a little bit differently.

Ray Briggs
Do you think that there is an alternative vision in there of a way things could be good? Or is just like telling the truth about ways things that are bad? Like, is that the project? Or is it like different in different novels,

Paula Moya
I think it’s probably not different in the different novels, even though the way it manifests is very different. I think those two projects go together. So in the same way that we need to actually understand our real history in order to make a better future. I think Toni Morrison believes that we have to actually understand how people are to each other, how they act, how they interact, how they treat each other, in order to understand how we might be able to treat each other in a better. So you know, what one thing she does in “The Bluest Eye,” as in other novels, is give us a tremendous amount of context, about the characters, you know, which we can see as people about how they came up, and why they have the attitudes they do and why they treat each other the way they do in order to understand how, you know, it might have gone differently, and they might be able to do it differently. So I think there’s those projects go together. She’s not trying to make this neutral for us, and she wants to make us work. So I think, right.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question about how this relates to sort of book banning. And I feel a little bit silly, even giving voice to this objection, because I don’t believe it. But I can imagine somebody saying, look, it’s all fine and good to reflect on the horrors of slavery, but like, a lot of a lot of Morrison’s novels are pretty graphic, and it’s really intense. And is it too intense for high school kids to handle like, should we shelter them?

Paula Moya
Well, I guess I just want to give a little bit more credit to high school aged children, or young people, I’ll say, one thing that I have to say about Morrison, and I suspect you’ll agree with me is that she’s an extraordinarily talented writer, you know, she’s really able to convey ordinary and extraordinary experiences of human lives with a talent, you know, of using figural, you know, say metaphorical language that really is kind of unsurpassed. And I think one other thing I would say, Ray, is that Morrison is never voyeuristic. You know, she doesn’t allow the reader to get pleasure in this violence. She portrays it very effectively, often using metaphors. But it is always with a framework that, you know, reminds us of that context that brought the person to that violence or to that predation, that, you know, makes us really think about you know, how we maybe got there.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and to my mind, that’s exactly why high school kids should be reading Morrison. I mean, I’m not talking about obviously, you know, very young kids you right i but you know towards the end of high school, 16-17 years old. These are fantastic books, not just as an entry into history, and politics and really important questions that are still very much alive today. But also for just stretching your mind. I mean, these are tour de force novels that show you what a novel can be. And they’re also their political ruminations, their philosophical ruminations. There’s all this stuff in a mercy about the problem of suffering. Why does—if there’s a benevolent god why is there so much suffering? Implicitly, including slavery, of course. And Morrison is constantly thinking philosophically and raising the philosophical questions—what better thing for a 17 year old to read?

Paula Moya
Exactly. And I think, you know, her books are deeply ethical, you know, they, they ask you to think about the choices that you’re making, and to think about how you want to take something that happened to you in the past, into the future or not. So I think it’s, it’s right at that age, you know, 16, or 17, where you’re kind of learning how to be a person, you know, that you have to learn how to make choices. And you know that all choices are not the same, all choices are not equal. And so I think reading Morrison’s books and the way that she gives us appropriate context for how people come to be who they are, that she is able to, in a sense, instruct us and teach us how to be better people in the world.

Josh Landy
Couldn’t agree more. Paula, thank you so much for joining us today.

Paula Moya
Well, thank you so much, Josh. I was glad to be here.

Josh Landy
Paula Maya from Stanford University on why Toni Morrison should be on our reading list all year round. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. And today it’s our annual summer reading special: the banned books edition

Ray Briggs
Coming up: if a Nobel Prize-winning author can be banned for supposedly inappropriate content, what about other books full of murder, adultery and sexual immorality, like… the Bible? And what happens when suppressing controversial books and ideas collides with freedom of speech in schools and university?

Josh Landy
Banning books in the classroom and beyond, plus other recommendations for controversial summer reading, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tim
My name is Tim Smith and the book that I’m nominating is “Dr. Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak. It was banned for about 20 years, little bit more. At the time, anybody who criticized Stalin could be put to death or central Siberia. It has that in it, it has criticism of Marxism, in short, little paragraphs here and there by different characters. It criticizes collectivization, which is what was going on in the Ukraine, that created the Russian speaking population there, they collectivized the agriculture there, and sent out some of the Ukrainian farmers, you know, reading this book, you really see the chaos, the Khrushchev, you know, he’s the one who took over after Stalin, and that he himself was to pose or, you know, left power. And then he actually read the book. And when he read the book, he regretted supposedly banning it. So it’s not a great book, it’s not character development is kind of off them, the morality is a little off, but it’s the chaos of the times, and the pictures and the little vignettes in it, that really bring it home.

Paul
This is Paul calling from Berkeley. And the book I want to suggest, is called “How the World Really Works.” The author is Vaclav Smil. He discusses the basics of how our modern world civilization is held together by a relatively few major components. And he describes how these interact with climate change, and also with the human population. And I have been fascinated by the population question ever since I was a kid, which was a long time ago. And there seems to be this tendency on everybody’s part to think it just doesn’t matter. But this viewpoint ignores the fact that there is some limit to the population somewhere. So the philosophical question would be, you know, what’s our goal? Do we want to have, you know, as many human souls as possible all standing on one another’s heads? Or do we want to keep some semblance of Earth, you know, for us to enjoy?

Matthew
My name is Matthew, I’m from California. I’m recommending Roger Scruton’s “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands.” Scruton himself, of course, was a bit of an outsider. And in this particular book, he takes a lot of what would now be considered sacred cows in the world of philosophy and social sciences. However it’s not mere criticism in the sense that he’s responding and that he directly analyzes the text and what these authors said, and his reaction to what they said. And I think that’s important these days, because a lot of assumptions are being pushed in a lot of changing in academia. And while some may see this book is controversial, and I myself don’t agree with everything Scruton says. I would say that this is certainly worth reading, and worth thinking about, especially if you come from a background where people like Foucault or Habermas or or Judith Butler are considered prime modern philosophers, hearing what Scruton has to say is relevant and important.

Josh Landy
Thanks very much to our listeners for suggesting those banned or controversial books to read this summer. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and it’s our annual summer reading show—the Banned Books edition—generously sponsored by the Stanford Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Josh Landy
So it’s presumably wrong to ban a book for political reasons. But what about academic reasons? What if a book is full of misinformation and terrible arguments—does free speech demand that we pay attention to it?

Ray Briggs
Jennifer Ruth is Professor of Film at Portland State University. And Michael Bérubé is Professor of English at Penn State University. Their new book is titled “It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom.” They argue that free speech and academic freedom are two very different things.

Jennifer Ruth
Academic freedom, technically, is the freedom the protections for research teaching and extramural by which we mean like social media speech, intramural, by which we mean speaking within the organization, so faculty speaking to administrators about the organization of the university protections for that kind of work. And that’s a collective whereas free speech, the First Amendment, is very much an individual-based right. Academic freedom is a collectively-regulated and governed right. And the sort of foundational organization, American Association of University Professors, they organized because faculty were getting fired by administrators whose wives didn’t like something that a professor said and all kinds of crazy reasons that had nothing to do with whether the professor’s work was intellectually legitimate or not. And so professors organized, John Dewey was part of the original organization, and they said, well, we have to come up with some principles and guidelines for academic freedom that protect faculty from arbitrary influence of non-experts. So what that means that the corollary for that, though, is that experts do have to police one another. And that’s where academic freedom is different from free speech, perhaps. Free speech—your opinion is as good as a fact.

Ray Briggs
So like, what would be an example of somebody that is protected by my right to free speech, but isn’t protected by academic freedom,

Michael Bérubé
Phrenology as much to teach us. And we will bring calipers to prove it. And that’s actually an example from the book. I mean, again, if we’re talking about 100-120 years ago, phrenology was still considered sort of the cutting edge of criminology—Cesare Lombroso made an entire career out of it. No responsible person should be promoting phrenology today. But if you want to do it on the street corner—go to, you know, and good luck.

Josh Landy
So phrenology is unlikely to come up, right, in classrooms. But what about various interesting views about COVID-19? I mean, we had a bunch of those coming out of various corners of Stanford University, and of course, other universities. You know, there was a Stanford historian who, who said, as a matter of science, that governors are wrong, because I guess historians know better about science. And, you know, we had an economist telling us the number of deaths in the United States would be 5000. And we had someone who became a member the Trump administration saying masks don’t work. What should happen in a case like that? I mean, these are claims that have been roundly debunked by the vast consensus of specialists. What should happen?

Jennifer Ruth
So what happened with Scott Atlas, I think was very instructive and that the faculty senate–well, that Stanford faculty, you know, put together a petition, and then they brought it to the Senate and they said, why should—you know, Stanford has an important reputation for helping provide information that’s useful for democracy. We have someone who the vast majority of his peers would say, is peddling misinformation. How do we hold that person accountable? And it’s extremely hard. And that’s partly why we wrote the book, because we’re arguing that some of the older traditional ways of capturing someone who has is sort of destructively peddling misinformation, and then under the guise of academic authority would have been weeded out. We don’t have a lot of those protections anymore for two reasons. One is that we’ve vastly gone down the road of hiring off the tenure track, which means that all the whole sort of vetting procedures where your peers evaluate your work and decide whether or not you deserve tenure, which is what gives you academic freedom, essentially, many, many faculty don’t go through that process. And then of course, there are faculty who have tenure who are nonetheless spreading misinformation that a university and a whole discipline or field may feel is very, very destructive. been problematic. So that’s why we came up with the idea of academic freedom committee where people could return to the originals, sort of, we have to police one another, in order to maintain the kind of high levels of job security that tenure provides. It comes with a responsibility to be checked fact checking one another, essentially.

Michael Bérubé
Yeah, in fact, we have an extended rant; we condensed it for an essay in the New Republic two months ago. But one of our chapters opens up by going after a really regrettable 1994 statement put out by the AAUP, by the American Association of University Professors. And it was a response to speech codes, it was a response to the so called political correctness scare of the early 90s. There’s one passage in there that says, “A university tracks a perilous pass if it starts distinguishing high value from low value speech.” And then there’s another really horrible line, “Indeed, by proscribing any ideas, the university sets an example that profoundly disserves its academic mission. And Jennifer and I are like, no actually, one of the things we’re supposed to do is proscribe some ideas. So we actually name a bunch of people in the book. And even though Jennifer and I swear that we are not going to adjudicate every case, we don’t even know if these people should be fired or disciplined or what, we think that should be left to their peers. But we actually come up with a number of, we think, fairly difficult cases where people are calling into question their own professional fitness to teach.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question about the race science example, actually, because I can think of multiple things that are wrong with race science, and I’m not sure which of them are relevant. So one that seems like it definitely ought to be relevant is that race science isn’t true. Like we don’t we have good evidence that it’s not true. Another one is that it’s bigoted. It’s like politically bad. Another one that a lot of people sort of mention is that it’s offensive. And another one is that it’s potentially harmful. And those seem like separate features. Which of them are irrelevant. Which of them are most relevant to whether—

Michael Bérubé
The first! Yeah, we make a point of not going anywhere near the second, third, and fourth rationales. I mean, we believe it is bigoted, it is harmful. But we’re not going to make that case. Because it allows someone like a law professor at Penn, University of Pennsylvania—when Amy Wax was told that her really crazy versions of race science as applied to immigration, when she was told that this was hurtful and damaging, she was like, yeah, the truth hurts—suck it up, buttercup. You’re leaving people—you’re giving these trolls a slam dunk answer by going right to the harm question. Now, having said that, one of the founding texts of Critical Race Theory in the early 90s was called “Words That Wound,” and a lot of argument from minority scholars was that these kinds of arguments, these kinds of slurs are profoundly damaging. We don’t doubt that they are. We’re not in a really great position as white people to make that case, to ventriloquise it. We think the really important argument to be made with academic freedom is that these various offshoots of race science have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever, and should be moved over to the phrenology side of the table.

Jennifer Ruth
So Michael answered the question really clearly, in terms of it’s a question of fitness. It’s not a question of harm, or necessarily even a question of whether it’s destructive of the democracy that academic freedom is supposed to ultimately be in service. But this question of unfitness is what’s key because there’s a surge to ban history of America, The 1619 Project, etc. Because it makes us uncomfortable, or it’s a divisive concept. And that’s fundamentally wrong. And fundamentally, they’re using free speech to attack academic freedom, you might say, it’s not so much that Nikole Hannah Jones should have her free speech rights to teach about 1619 at Howard, if she want; it’s her academic freedom to do so because this is stuff that’s been vetted by her peers, it’s because she has a prizes for this work. So they’re attacking academic freedom when they go after our history.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, it’s our annual summer reading special. And we’re talking to Jennifer Ruth and Michael Bérubé, co-authors of “It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom.”

Ray Briggs
So I have a question in a slightly different direction about which speech is protected by academic freedom. You said at the beginning, I can go stand on a street corner and yell about whatever nonsense I want. And that’s not a matter of academic freedom. But when I’m in the classroom, it’s protected by academic freedom. What if I’m like posting on my blog, like under my professor identity?

Michael Bérubé
We have a whole chapter on that for those who really want to get into the weeds because it’s incredibly complicated. If we can boil it down to a single very long bumper sticker, it would go like this. When you’re speaking in social media, you have more protection for things about what you know nothing than about speaking from your area of expertise. So in other words, if I want to mouth off about I don’t know what whatever sports thing or if I want to actually suggest that the movie Apollo 18 was not in fact fiction, it was a documentary and people are covering it up. Okay, I’m a nut. But I have no expertise in this area I’m just mouthing off. If I start doing things—I work among other things in disability studies—if I start going back and saying, you know, there are certain advantages to involuntary sterilization of the so called feeble-minded, now I’m calling into question my fitness to teach anything, let alone disability studies. So the relationship of extramural speech, speech in social media speech, on the street corner, the academic freedom is really, really complicated. We have in this country made it that way because we have decided to include extramural speech as part of academic freedom. Some traditions do not, most European traditions do not—they leave extramural speech to the protection or lack of protection by the state. We decided that it’s part of the armature of academic freedom to give academics as much latitude as possible even when they’re not in the classroom. And that’s really where most of your controversies have come from in the last 10-15 years. Yeah,

Josh Landy
I mean, I think that’s a very helpful way of thinking about what’s okay and what’s not okay in this extramural speech and the speech outside of school—speech on on your blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, or something like that. Iou know, it’s not just false, it’s not just dangerous, but it shows you shouldn’t be allowed in the classroom, you don’t have what it takes. Now the chops, right, you’ve lost your ability to separate the truth from the false. But there’s another really interesting sort of aspect of the, the world of social media, which is that it really seems to be disproving this old notion I think we all get from John Stuart Mill, who has a lot to be said for him, but that that, you know, well really the best discourse environment is one in which everyone gets a voice. And if you just, you know—free market, right, just let everyone speak, and the good information will drown out the bad. And I think we’re all we’re all learning that it Mill’s wrong and Swift is right, that falsehood flies a truth comes limping after it. Is that Is that about where the two of you are as well?

Michael Bérubé
Yes, We take Justice Brandeis’s famous line, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” and like well… Ulrich Baer has a really interesting argument in his book, “What Snowflakes Get Right,” that between 1977 in Skokie, Illinois, and 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, maybe tolerating and defending Nazis didn’t make them go away. And maybe sunlight is good for Nazis because it makes them grow. And maybe bleach we think would be a better disinfectant. So we don’t actually go so far as to call for sort of a hate speech exception to the First Amendment. We do think the First Amendment has been vastly over extended by the Roberts Court in the last 10-12 years. But we’re actually not legal experts. We did not stay in Holiday Inn Express last night. And we only learned the term “First Amendment Lochnerism” in the course of writing this book, from the legal theorists Tim Wu. But we’re at least willing to say, if you are not alarmed by the complete proliferation of inexpert speech and a world in which people get their medical advice from Joe Rogan, you have not been paying attention.

Ray Briggs
So one thing I really like about your approach is the way that it sets aside considerations like, is this speech gonna hurt somebody’s feelings for considerations of is this speech actually true?

Josh Landy
And another thing that I like is that it’s scrupulously fair, right? So you’re not taking sides. This isn’t a book that says, right-wing faculty are saying things we don’t like and they should be disciplined. And it’s also not saying left-wing faculty are saying things we don’t like and they should be. It’s saying, look, there’s actually a variety of different cases. And, you know, one of the main purposes of the First Amendment is expressive, it allows people to just speak their mind, but one of the main values of academic freedom is epistemic, it helps us get the truth. That’s what we want at a university. So how do we how do we get the train back on the rails? How do we make sure that folks aren’t just polluting the discourse environment aren’t just weaponizing their status in order to spread misinformation? How do we get universities to take this more seriously?

Jennifer Ruth
That’s a really good question in terms of, because there’s no question of the distinction between academic freedom of free speech is actually seems to be sort of infecting the university itself in terms of incapacitating faculty to feel like we can judge one another. But that’s, in fact, what we are here to do in large part. So an academic—well, I think your point that what you like about the book is that we’re not saying, you know, this is harmful, so you can’t do it, this is… We’re not just sort of taking whole categories and saying you can talk about this. You can’t talk about that. But we’re talking about who gets to judge, right. It shouldn’t be a provost or a president who’s trying to—who’s risk-averse, It shouldn’t be a politician who’s trying, an Attorney General who wants to ban CRT because he’s primarily reading Chris Rufo is his primary source. Those aren’t the people who should judge. It should be peers within a discipline or adjacent fields that are in the same kinds of conversations as the person who’s being judged. So who’s being judged and how you do it the deliberative process that could go a long way towards helping put put some guardrails in at a moment where we really need them.

Ray Briggs
So Jennifer, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jennifer Ruth
Thank you.

Michael Bérubé
Thanks for having us.

Ray Briggs
Jennifer Ruth and Michael Bérubém co authors of “It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom.—a book we’ve definitely got on our summer reading list.

Josh Landy
Coming up: summer book suggestions from Ian Shaoles the Sixty-Second Philosopher, plus the case for banning the Bible—when Philosophy Talk’ Banned Books Summer Reading special continues.

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk’s annual Summer Reading List—Banned Books edition, generously sponsored by the Stanford Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re thinking about thoughtful and controversial books that some people say other people shouldn’t read.

Josh Landy
Over in Florida, they just passed a bill allowing parents to challenge books taught in schools, anything with material some parent happens to find disturbing.

Ray Briggs
Our next guest, Florida activist Chaz Stevens, has a not-entirely tongue-in-cheek response: let’s ban the Bible!

Josh Landy
Ban the Bible?

Ray Briggs
Well, yeah, think about it. People want to ban Maus, the graphic novel about the Holocaust, because it’s got cartoon animals that briefly are depicted without clothes. So if that’s your standard, why not the Bible? It’s full of sex and violence. There’s even an episode where an innocent woman is murdered and cut into 12 pieces so that the pieces can be sent to the tribe.

Josh Landy
That’s pretty disturbing, right? But still, I mean, Exodus, think about Exodus that was used by abolitionist as part of their argument against slavery. Think of Martin Luther King’s mountaintop speech.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, sure. But you’ll look ahead of you books in the Bible, and you’re going to find servants obey your masters. People drew on that kind of thing for centuries when they wanted to justify slavery. Heck, the Bible even has some of the earliest accounts of a genocide, but God telling the Israelites to murder every Amalekite man, woman and child, even the sheep 1000 donkeys.

Josh Landy
Okay, so maybe it’s a mix, like Bertrand Russell said. I mean, Russell has that whole essay called “Why I Am Not a Christian,” and he is really not a fan of some things like hell, for example, but but even he admits that turning the other cheek—that’s pretty great.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, he was a pacifist.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And giving to the poor and, and not judging lest you be judged.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, the point isn’t the Christianity is necessarily terrible in every way. The point is that maybe the state shouldn’t impose it on everyone.

Josh Landy
One person who thinks that is Chaz Stevens. Let’s hear why he’s petitioning to have the Bible banned from 63 Florida school ddstricts.

Chaz Stevens
It’s like the Republicans asked the library to go on a diet. And they went through and they took everything else except the box of Krispy Kremes. And if you’re going on a diet, take the box of Krispy Kremes. That’s the first one. So you really don’t have to look very far in the Bible to say, Holy crap—are we teaching our kids that? Cannibalism, beastiality, murder, rape incest…. My favorite, Psalm 137.9: nine smashing babies against the rocks. Turn a page and find something that will make your eyes go all bonkers.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, it seems right that if you don’t want children reading about, like murder, and sex and cruelty and violence, you probably shouldn’t give them the Bible. And I think like I could take two morals from this, right? I could think, look, I shouldn’t control at all what kids are allowed to read. Or you could think like, I shouldn control what kids are allowed to read and one of the things I shouldn’t give them is the Bible. Do you have a stance on which of those answers is right?

Chaz Stevens
Absolutely. Banning Bibles, banning books, burning books—absolutely ridiculous. However, they say that the Bible book of fiction is parables. And there’s some good stories in there. But there’s some not good stories in there. So if you want to find ethics, do you find ethics or some Bronze Age guys who couldn’t work their way out of the desert? Or what about Kantian ethics? Right, the golden rule and all that other good stuff. So it’s, it’s just really, it’s—welcome to Florida. It’s bizarre.

Josh Landy
Well, you’re in you’re in good company, because, you know, Bertrand Russell, the philosopher had an essay called “Why I Am Not a Christian,” where he made some similar arguments. There’s, look, there’s some things I really like in the New Testament. You know, turn the other cheek. Don’t judge people, give away your goods to the poor. But he said the whole notion of an afterlife of eternal punishments, he said, that’s a doctrine of cruelty. And so for him, it’s a kind of a mixed bag where, you know, you might get some good lessons for life out of it. But if you’re not careful, you might be steered on a kind of dangerous path. But what the thing I love most about what what you’re doing to your campaign is really exposing hypocrisy,

Chaz Stevens
Indeed. My education, my undergrad and graduate degrees in mathematics. So I have a track record back in the day of empowering hypocrisy. In the state of Florida. I watched the local city City Commission meeting, have an invocation and they said the word Jesus Christ 23 times in two minutes and I thought, listen, I’m just there to get my doc approved. I’m not here for Sunday school. So I had this I had this little campaign called “Satan or Silence”—14th amendment, you gotta let me go in guys, you know, as a satanist. I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in any of that stuff. And five local cities here in South Florida, Broward County, one in Palm Beach, said no, we’re just going to take our ball and go home. Okay, so that’s the same thing with this Bible thing. I expect to lose, I expect to be told 63 times that take off, and in all sorts of different ways. But I hope that they give me a fair shake. I think in Broward County that I got a little carried away in Broward County, not only did I ask for the Bible to be rejected, I also asked for the dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, to be rejected. And I asked for, I asked for the top 10 Fox News Channel books. And then I thought to myself, because I’m a nerd, I’m in it right. And I have friends that are in school teachers and I think the world at them, I spent a lot of time in college. I said to them, so is there is there such thing as a library these days? And they said no, not really. There’s some books and there’s some old beat up computers that we had desktops that the kids beat up over the years. But what the school provides is online access, and there’s carts that go around with laptops and grab the laptop and then google, you’re ready to do that? Well, I guarantee alittle Jimmy in 11th grade isn’t able to see the latest, the latest Jugs magazine on the school laptop. And the same way that if they’re going to prevent kids from seeing pornography, they need to see if they agree that the Bible is horrible, they need to block access to that. That’s what I’m shooting for. It’s not actually the physical book, because there’s probably not gonna be a Bible no and local here in Deerfield Beach library, but there’s gonna be online access to that. And if they can block Playboy magazine, they can block the Bible, they can block the dictionary.

Ray Briggs
I love this device of asking to ban the dictionary, because I think it exposes this, like really common way of thinking that like if if there is information about an unpleasant or horrifying thing that happened, children shouldn’t be exposed to it. And I think that you see this and like a lot of attempts to ban like so called Critical Race Theory seem like attempts to ban talking about horrible racist things that have happened in the US and that seems kind of wrongheaded that like if a bad thing happened, you shouldn’t talk about that. Is that like informing your approach at all here?

Chaz Stevens
When I came up with artwork—I have this artwork called “Not in the Bible.” I’m an artist it’s beautiful. It’s literally it’s—and I imagine what a smashed baby against the rock is, Psalm 137.9. So I did this artwork and I was lambasted, nickel—uh, ankle-bit by the Christians saying that I took that out of context—smashing babies, you know, happy is he who smashes babies against the rocks. I took that whole thing out of context because of, it was the Babylonians raising up against somebody or other. Okay. I am currently suing the state of Florida. The Rotunda—you guys might not know, I was the fellow that put up the Festivus pole, the Gay Pride Festivus pole an the PBR Pabst Blue Ribbon Festivus pole back in 2013. Rick Scott governor at the time—Skeletor—he pinched my First Amendment rights, he wanted to shut me down. This past December, I put up Fauci Claus. I’m vaxed, I’m boosted, I take care of my elderly parents. So it was a standee of Fauci dressed up like Don Draper from Mad Men in this red Santa’s outfit, which I sent him one six foot tall standee, and next to him was Tucker Carlson as the Grim Reaper. Boy, that didn’t go over well. I’ve had artwork about Gay Vader, dad hates Ron, which is buddy Christ telling holding up a sign says “I hate Ron.” Bue truck balls. Ron DeSantis as a macho cop on the front of Playboy magazine—these are 24 by 36 paintings that I’ve done. All said no. So I’m suing—not only am I trying to get rid of the Bible, trying to get rid of the dictionary, trying to get rid of Tucker Carlson and his books, I’m also suing the state of Florida, so apparently I have a good hobby.

Josh Landy
Your hobby is a hilarious onr, but of course it has this serious point which is let’s be fair, right? I mean, either we don’t have any religion in the public square right in front of courthouse. I was is and, and so estate houses and so on, or, you know, it’s open to any religion that wants to be there. That’s the principle of fairness. It goes back to the establishment clause in the First Amendment. And it applies to books, right in the in these in school libraries if you’re gonna ban one book, like, like Spiegelman’s mouse, for having a completely harmless drawing, that in context has to be understood is not in any way provocative. Well, then you should ban the Bible, if you’re not going to bend the Bible. Yeah, and get a need to keep Spiegelman’s Maus in the school library. Is that am I about right? That’s where you are Chaz?

Chaz Stevens
You’re spot-on, spot-on. It’s the 14th Amendment: equal due process under the law, right? My formula is really easy. It’s perfected after a decade—as Winston Churchill says, Americans do everything wrong, and eventually they’ll do the right thing. So after 10 years, I finally figured out what it is. It’s you figure out what the hypocrisy is, you figure out what the bureaucratic hypocrisy is, and then you flip the script 180 degrees, and then you use the weight of bureaucracy against itself. I don’t have to do anything. I literally said banned the Bible and the Washington Post is calling me the next day. So if anybody wants to get off their tush and into the game, figure out what the hypocrisy is, figure out the bureaucracy behind it, and just flip the script 180 degrees and boom, you’re in the game. You’re doing a Chaz—congratulations, welcome aboard.

Ray Briggs
I love the idea of using hypocritical bureaucracy against itself. And I think that’s a great note to end on. Chaz, thank you so much for joining us today.

Chaz Stevens
My pleasure. Thanks guys for having me.

Josh Landy
Florida activist chairs Stephens on his “crusade” to get the Bible banned in his state’s schools.

Ray Briggs
You can find all the books we’ve talked about on today’s show, along with other recommendations from our listeners. over at our website Philosophy Talk dot o-r-g.

Josh Landy
But if you just want the Cliff’s Notes version, there’s always Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. Summer reading lists usually include biographies, if they aren’t too long, autobiographies preferred, because they’re chipper and anecdotal, and the subject doesn’t die at the end. We like history, if it’s obscure or uplifting, or both, like how well Lincoln got along with everybody who hated him, or the secret woman who invented a missile guidance system. Can’t go wrong with thrillers. You’re supposed to take those to the beach for some reason. Nowadays, I’d worry about the book catching fire. Also thrillers seem more branded than they used to be. I guess we always had the Nancy Drews and James Bonds and Reachers, but thriller writer James Patterson, for example, offers on line classes. Modern readers can teach themselves to write thrillers just like the other thrillers, saving a bundle at the airport news stand. Pay yourself to read it! Hope your flight’s on time! Point being maybe it’s time to disrupt the summer reading list tradition. Any venture capitalist wants to give me money to do that I can give you a white paper and a timeline with earmarks before your thousand dollar pen even touches the checkbook. PM me. DM me. Text me. Point being, reading lists today face many challenges! I can pretty much guarantee that nobody has made their way through the wall of tell all books that slid out of the Trump White House. We must get on that! First things first! And if Trump goes on trial for treason or is reelected President, both not outside the realm of possibility, we may want to surrender full time to the reality television metaverse and reject literacy altogether. In the meantime, books are being slid into the flames on a daily basis. Figuratively. Book used to be burned out of heresy, or racism, but we today we save on matches and just take them off the shelf. And reasons vary. They may trigger some of us, usually through the injudicious use of pronouns- even though conservatives say get over it, snowflake, you’re too sensitive. Conservatives only want to take books off the shelf if gay people are mentioned. To be be both sides ist about it, clearly cancel culture is a one way two way street. Young adult authors cancel each other all the time; fantasy sci horror – most genres are heavily watched these days, over diversity issues, cultural appropriation, sexism, you name it. Leaving us with the same old claptrap that gave us the cancel parade in the first place. As consolation prizes we have the Avengers, Star Wars, teeming with conflicted heroes! Dozens of novels and movies about young people in wizard schools struggling to be diverse! Instead of fighting Indians, natives, or fanatics, heroes now lay waste to robots, clones, and evil twins from other dimensions. Mysteries are becoming pretty woke, I believe, but they remain Swedish and depressing. Are books even worth it? Comics are still collectible. I recommend buying one as a hedge against inflation. Keep it in a bag though. Don’t read it, are you crazy? And if you buy action figures with it, keep them in the original packaging, until America’s mood swings, which means we’ll be looking back with nostalgia at these times for some damn reason, making your comic even more valuable. Oh, what to read right now? Why not check out BAD BOY OF MUSIC, the 1945 memoir of George Antheil. He was a composer, surrealist, futurist, wrote movie music, operas, worked on a missile guidance system with Hedi Lamarr. Settle down with that. Remind yourself that we once had a culture. Kind of. Well, we still have an action figure in a bag! So that’s something. Not cryptocurrency. If the bottom drops out of cryptocurrency, you got nothing. But if the bottom drops out of your bag, you still have a plastic minifig elf lord. Worthless, because it’s not in the original packaging. But very very real. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2022.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The senior producer is Devins Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from subscribers to our online Community of Thinkers. Support for this episode comes from the Stanford Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or mis expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford university or of our other funders

Ray Briggs
…not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.orrg where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening…

Josh Landy
…and thank you for thinking.