Book burnings
I’ll give the word to Terry Pratchett, here’s a passage from The Light Fantastic:
“Lackjaw was lost in thought for a moment. ‘Setting fire to things,’ he said at last. ‘They’re quite good at that. Books and stuff. They have these great big bonfires.’
Cohen [Cohen the Barbarian that is, US] was shocked.
‘Bonfires of books?’
‘Yes. Horrible, isn’t it?’
‘Right,’ said Cohen. He thought it was appalling. Someone who spent his life living rough under the sky knew the value of a good thick book, which ought to outlast at least a season of cooking fires if you were careful how you tore the pages out. Many a life had been saved on a snowy night by a handful of sodden kindling and a really dry book. If you felt like a smoke and couldn’t find a pipe, a book was your man every time.
Cohen realized people wrote things in books. It had always seemed to him to be a frivolous waste of paper.”
…
I generally like books. Well, that’s not actually true, I like good books. They are in the minority of all books. Lots of bad books out there. If ten million of those bad books disappeared out of thin air, I think the world would be a better place. People picking up a random book would be more likely to pick up a good one and this would be an improvement over the status quo, because bad books do a lot of harm by making people who read them forget that there are good books out there, or at least by making the good books harder to find. I guess I’m saying I have a hard time getting why anyone besides the clichéed bespectacled 60 year old librarian care about whether some guy decides to set a book on fire or not. Most people who think they ought to hold an opinion on the subject haven’t even read the damn book, many of them haven’t even read all that many books in the first place and most of the ones they’ve read were likely crap anyway. Why care? – life’s way too short to care about something like this.
Symbols are but what we make of them.
2 Comments »
Leave a comment
Recent Comments
Sabra Zaraa on Cost-effectiveness analysis in… adityaguharoy on Combinatorics (I) therookswinger on Magnus Carlsen playing bullet… Stefan on Quotes US on Quotes Goodreads Quotes
Usfromdk’s quotes
"Happiness and its anticipation are […] proximate mechanisms that lead us to perform and repeat acts that in the environments of history, at least, would have led to greater reproductive success." (Richard D. Alexander)Statcounter
Econstudentlog 
I meant to write a comment to your Dorothy Rowe post, and gave up on it, but this one tie nicely into the same issue I have: good for/to whom? Who gets to define “good”?
Like you, I think think many, probably most, books are worse than worthless – according to my definition of worth. I think the world would be a better place without them; and then I try to remember (not always successfully) that every dictator out there thinks he/she knows better, and feels obligated to protect the unwashed masses from their ignorance.
As a little side note/illustration – NOT a jab at Europe… Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is banned (or am I wrong?) in a significant part of Europe. Have the people who banned it even read it? I have. I have a copy of it on my PC. It’s not evil. Nazism is evil, but “Mein Kampf” is idiotic. More people ought to read it to get a perspective on how idiotic the whole 1918-1946 era was. If a person nowadays reads “Mein Kampf”, and thinks “Yeah, this is good stuff, this makes sense”… they are retards whom you will not protect from their own stupidity by banning one (or one million) books. They are the kind that you should ignore or ridicule if you care (not my approach) until they threaten or assault you, in which case you take them down hard and fast – not because they are nazis, but because they are criminals.
Here’s my libertarian solution: channeling Voltaire (“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”), I think burning books should be perfectly legal, and not at all morally reprehensible. It’s not a smart thing to do, but… as you say, “Symbols are but what we make of them.” If someone wants to burn copies of “Mein Campf”, or the Quran, or the Bible, or “The Road to Serfdom”, all the power to them – I’ll be happy to be selling them copies. If they want to steal, confiscate, ban (and maybe burn – I do not care) MY copy, they deserve, and would get, an instant case of severe lead poisoning.
Another side note: the whole physical-book-burning thing seems to me to be an atavism from times when a physical book had significant value; when torching a library actually denied access to a book to a significant number of people. The Great Firewall of China has deprived more people of information than all the actual book-burning ever done – at least on a raw number basis. Okay, maybe the torching of the Library of Alexandria was worse (on a significance-for-humanity basis), but I think my point is clear.
For what it’s worth, the last time I bought a paper book was in 2007, and it was paid for (reimbursed) by my employer. My library card expired in 2008 🙂
My position is not: ‘I’d like to somehow make the “bad” books disappear’, it’s more like: ‘if (what I consider) the “bad” books disappeared somehow, (I’d think) it’d be a good thing’. Your ‘libertarian solution’ is the same as mine.
As to Mein Kampf, there are no restrictions on possesion, sale or purchase of the book in Denmark (as far as I know). Wikipedia has a section on availability of the book here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf#Current_availability
I thought about including your last point (‘another side note’), but decided against it. Of course I agree – book burning is an obsolete method of fighting ideas, most book burnings entails only a very small amount of information loss.
I buy something like one (paper) book a month, maybe more, maybe less, haven’t really thought about it. It’s a quite price-sensitive component of my consumption function. I like to write and paint in my books, so I’m not a big fan of libraries.