Sock Puppets vs. the Herd of Hermetically Sealed Minds

After Greg Morrow of the Howling Curmudgeons board posted his dismissive comment to James Nicolls's blog, I responded with a three-part post attempting -- one last time & against the odds of addressing hermetically sealed minds -- to explain to people unwilling even to read my posts with any care (sometimes at all) or to verify the information I'd consistently provided links to in order to substantiate the veracity of my statements, that the First Amendment is not the only applicable measure of censorship & that boycotts distort & undermine the free marketplace of ideas. All they seemed to be concerned with, however, was the possibility that the few other posters to those blogs who've agreed with me might be my "sock puppets."

That would almost be too funny if it weren't so paranoid....


Here's my three-part post of October 4, 2007:

My sincere thanks to Greg Morrow for placing a link here to my posts to him on his Howling Curmudgeons board concerning his attack on Dark Horse's proposed republication of John Norman’s Chronicles of Gor!

For those who have mastered the essential methodological differences between effectively interpreting philosophical imaginative fiction & expository non-fiction (as classically explicated by Mortimer Adler & Charles Van Doren in How to Read a Book, briefly quoted in the second of my posts to Greg) as well as how to decode irony, & who possess sufficiently open minds, reading my so-called “apologetics” should suffice. And for those who’ve attained the requisite degree of such analytical reading skills who might stumble onto these threads in the future, it will doubtless be self-evident to them what the ferocity of the endless ridicule -- to which so many of the posters who’ve flocked here seem so reflexively prone when faced with an opinion materially contrary to their own -- signifies.

As the poet & abolitionist James Russell Lowell once insightfully observed, “The sneer is the weapon of the weak.”

These threads, however, have served as an excellent demonstration of why the annual observance of Banned Books Week remains so essential even into the 21st century. For that, on behalf of your many, if largely silent, readers over the last couple & coming weeks, I thank you all (especially Tamora Pierce & Jeremy Remy of Salt Lake Community College & his Die Wachen blog) for your very telling -- if largely unwitting -- contributions to this exercise since I first learned of your attacks!

Bellatrys, perhaps Jess Nevins, one of the other members of the Howling Curmudgeons board who’s also a librarian, possesses more patience than I do & will attempt to explain to you what my posts to Tamora’s blog (& the links therein to the A.L.A. materials that I’ve repeatedly provided) have evidently not yet succeeded in doing: that there is a critical, material difference between merely criticizing a book on the one hand, no matter how stridently, & on the other attempting in concert with others to pressure its publisher to withdraw it from publication, an effort which, if successful, precludes other people from being able to read the book to evaluate it for themselves. You might read up on the reaction of U.S. librarians when Harper-Collins had attempted to suppress the distribution of Michael Moore’s second book, Stupid White Men, in 2001.

The First Amendment addresses, first & foremost, state-sponsored censorship, but that doesn’t mean, in the U.S., either that there are or should be no limitations whatsoever on the non-violent suppression by “private censors” of the rights of others to free expression (e.g., as the late Justice White had noted in Red Lion v. the F.C.C, "Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests"), nor that such attempts at suppression by private citizens don’t harm civil discourse & constrict the marketplace of ideas, nor that they aren’t inherently & profoundly hypocritical when made by those who claim to champion free speech. As someone else had recently attempted to remind Bellatrys on her own board, Noam Chomsky once trenchantly commented, “If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”

A writer whose novels are today considered masterpieces of political satire once wrote in the introduction to one of those works, whose publication had been attained only after several other publishers had turned the manuscript down, deterred by the tyranny of the then majority:

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

The year was 1946, the writer was George Orwell, & the book whose publication had by then been suppressed for years -- principally by the prevailing leftist orthodoxy of the time -- was Animal Farm.

Herman Melville is today widely considered perhaps the greatest of American authors, although his contemporaries, despite their earlier enthusiasm for Typee & Omoo, had almost uniformly been baffled & disgusted by Moby Dick, such as the one who infamously wrote,

We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book.... Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature -- since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.

After the publication the following year of Melville’s controversial, experimental philosophical novel, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, whose central characters were portrayed as engaging in a possibly incestuous relationship, he was attacked even more savagely & ruthlessly by contemporary critics, whose effectiveness was such that he found it increasingly difficult to find a publisher for his later works: indeed, he eventually ceased writing altogether & the critically-acclaimed Billy Budd was only published posthumously, decades after Melville’s death. The Penguin Press edition of Pierre notes, for example,

"Ambiguities indeed! One long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity (to borrow Mr. Melville's style), like Melchisedeck without beginning or end - a labyrinth without a clue - an Irish bog without so much as a Jack o' th'-lantern to guide the wanderer's footsteps - the dream of a distempered stomach, disordered by a hasty supper on half-cooked pork chops." So judged the New York Herald when Pierre was first published in 1852, with most contemporary reviewers joining in the general condemnation: "a dead failure," "this crazy rigmarole," and "a literary mare's nest." Latter-day critics have recognized in the story of Melville's idealistic young hero a corrosive satire of the sentimental-Gothic novel, and a revolutionary foray into modernist literary techniques. As William Spengemann writes in his introduction to this edition, "For anyone who, being aware of the culture of modernity, is curious about its origins, Pierre ranks with Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, and the poems of Emily Dickinson as one of the privileged places where the dead past can be seen giving way inexorably to the living present.

The Northwestern University critical edition of Pierre similarly notes,

Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, Pierre, or The Ambiguities has since struck critics as modern in its psychological probings and literary technique--fit, as Carl Van Vechten said in 1922, to be ranked with The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, and Ulysses. None of Melville's other "secondary" works has so regularly been acknowledged by its most thorough [modern day] critics as a work of genuine grandeur, however flawed.

However, Melville’s many censorious contemporaries could not grant him even the opportunity to write for the few who did appreciate him. Twentieth century critics such as Van Vechten later compared their relentless attacks to “the insipidly cacophonous cawing of so many crows.” Melville is now recognized as a titan of American literature; those who had attacked him so self-righteously & uncomprehendingly in his lifetime are now remembered principally or only for that.

Jonquil, my dear, of course Augustine wasn’t thinking of Tarl Cabot when he’d written dilige et quod vis fac, if only because Tarl Cabot was a fictitious character & in any case, if you’d perhaps read my so-called “apologetics” with greater care you would have noticed, perhaps, that I hadn’t claimed that Norman had premised his own philosophy directly on Augustine’s aphorism but rather had drawn on it in a form that had been mediated first by Rabelais, then by Aldous Huxley, for whom it was no longer premised on religious faith. Quod vis fac has long been considered by many to be a pithy summation of the essence of “virtue ethics.” I’d recommend to you philosopher Alastair McIntyre’s After Virtue, but if you're as unfamiliar with the history of philosophy & virtue ethics as your posts indicate you to be, I’d recommend that you begin instead with his A Brief History of Ethics.

It’s been fun everyone (the accusations of “sock puppetry” were just too funny), & most illuminating, of course, but there’re only so many hours in a day, I have my own students to get back to, &, in any case, the wise farmer sows his seed neither on barren ground, nor where it will be trampled.


Ciao!

Charlotte