I make a living putting words together. Millions of others around the world do the same. If we do it well, we convey ideas, and those ideas carry ideals. Humanity moves forward and upward on words.
That’s why, of all the issues we face today, the banning of books mortifies me. Same for news outlets, magazines, blogs, podcasts, and all other conveyors of ideas,
“Die Gedanken Sind Frei”
There’s an old German protest song that was first published in 1780 but has roots in the 12th century – “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” – which translates to “Thoughts Are Free.” Although the translations into English are awkward, especially across the differences in poetic rhyme scheme and structure, the sentiment is unmistakable.
That’s why book banning and related activities like censorship, monitoring, and especially control of school curricula are so unnerving and mortifying. What’s even more revolting is that too many people are apparently unperturbed by this.
In the 15 years that I taught two graduate-level leadership and communications courses at Fairleigh Dickinson University – with students from 77 countries who attended many of the finest undergraduate schools here and abroad – I witnessed a precipitous decline in many areas, most disturbingly, critical thinking. Given the age range of my students – from their 20s to their 60s – I trace that back to at least two generations of diminishing emphasis on reading. Not to mention the reading modality we have universally chosen: that little blue underscored hyperlink on which we spend an average of 13 seconds – and then click again. We have given up the intimacy of, the commitment to, and the relationship with the 700-page book in favor of the flightiness, the convenience, and the ephemerality of the click.
Why, though, do we read? By reading great books, we declare and confirm our ongoing commitment to humanity past, present, and future. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein, Jack London’s adventure Call of the Wild, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, George Orwell’s 1984, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird – a good, diverse starting list. A review of banned books lists reveals a veritable library of great works, both classic and contemporary.
Let’s look at that last one, for example. Published in 1960, it won the Pulitzer Prize an astonishingly fast one year later and was required reading in my high school by 1962. I often say that if an alien visited Earth from a far-off planet and asked to take home one – just one – piece of American literature, that would be it. But it’s been on banned book lists since its publication.
Again, the question: Why do we read?
By reading, we practice and show infinite gratitude for all things past, infinite service for all things present, and infinite responsibility for all things future. Reading is infinite, a partnership with the infinite universe.
Critical thinking, most of all.
Aside from – but not in place of – the pleasure, the experience, and the life balance, reading, more than any other activity, develops our critical thinking skills, the glaring lack of which was fully on display during the 2024 election campaign. Democrats and Republicans, participants and observers, incumbents and challengers – all apparently did poorly in their fourth-grade schooling and beyond. And make no mistake, it starts that young.
And words become sentences … and so on.
Each year in Spain, The Princess of Asturias Foundation presents annual awards – The Princess of Asturias Awards – to individuals, entities or organizations from around the world who make notable achievements in the sciences, humanities, and public affairs.
In 2014, the Foundation presented one of its awards to a then 68-year-old Irish writer named John Banville. In accepting his award, Banville, who is still writing, said:
“I regard the sentence as the greatest invention of humankind. It’s the greatest thing we’ve done. There have been civilizations – the Aztecs and the Incas – so many who didn’t have the wheel, but they did have the sentence. Because the sentence is what makes us human. We think in sentences, we speak in sentences, we devise ideas in sentences, we declare love, we declare war in sentences. This is a basic unit of our humanness, and here I am spending my days working with this basic unit of humanness. It’s a great privilege and a great pleasure, but of course it’s very hard work and very frustrating. But I wouldn’t exchange it for anything else.”
How can one human so revere the sentence while others try very hard to repress it and make it impossible for the rest of us to read it? We all suffer. The cost is immeasurable, and hasn’t been fully tallied yet, as President Trump’s latest impulse, announced this week – to deconstruct the United States Department of Education – makes us painfully aware. Repressive autocrats around the world know this full well.
We cannot stand by and simply protest. If you’ve read Thoreau – and many, including Mahatma Gandhi have – you will understand what our responsibility is: Keep the thoughts free.