humans, at least humans in the urban regions of the united states and “the west”, are taught as children that “censorship” is bad and that “book burning” is the worst thing that can be imagined, because “freedom of expression” is sacred.
of course nobody really believes this. every human society takes for granted that certain things - many things - are beyond the pale and are not to be thought of, let alone expressed.
well meaning librarians and teachers, whose goal it is to interest children in reading , promote things like “banned books week”, in which completely harmless or salutary (from their point of view) books like “the catcher in the rye” or “to kill a mockingbird”,
or the harry potter books, which have occasionally run afoul of school boards in the christian fundamentalist wilds of kansas or mississippi, are held up as examples of books which have triumphed over the evils of “censorship” and “book burning” and survived to spread their light over a happy world.
probably the best known expression of this attitude is ray bradbury’s novel fahrenheit 451, itself a book which is considered highly suitable for adolescent consumption, and continually reprinted. it is one of those books that “everybody knows” the basic idea of, even if they have never read it.
if you read bradbury’s book today, it might not be quite what you expect. it was published in 1953. it presents a future in which books are burned, not in order to censor particular ideas or words, but because they present a threat to a soulless dystopia by offering a “human” alternative to movies and television, which are represented as being by their nature dehumanizing.. in 1953 television had been in widespread use for less than ten years, and talking pictures for less than thirty. now the human race was doomed because it was watching jackie gleason and dragnet instead of reading middlemarch and moby dick.
so the book does not quite track with the modern idea of “banned books”. but it does embody two ideas.
that “books” by their nature, are good, and spread good thoughts and attitudes, and that the evil heartless persons who rule, or aspire to rule, the earth, are against them and seek to suppress, if not literally burn them.
and that books, especially well known or “classic” books, are permanent objects, which will last more or less forever unless they are deliberately destroyed.
books are some of the most perishable objects on earth. they are made of words, and what is more perishable than words? humans spill forth trillions of words into the air every day.
books are written in particular languages, and languages are continually mutating and dying out.
books that are held up as having lasted for an appreciable amount of time must be continually annotated and edited (and their spelling and punctuation modernized) even in their original language.
books that are held up as having lasted for really long periods, “last” only by being continually retranslated - into dozens or hundreds of languages - some of them, such as the iliad and the odyssey, seemingly every year.
all of which is to say that there is nothing permanent or sacrosanct about any book - any book at all.
not the bible, or any other ”sacred book” , or the works of shakespeare, or any other author.
if you are killed or thrown in jail for writing something, that can fairly be called “censorship”.
otherwise it can be said that all written and spoken language is subject to the great lottery of time and fate, in which 99.9999999999999999999999999 … percent of everything vanishes moments after it comes into being.
