Book Burning

I admit to the cultural sin of burning books.  It was a long time ago, and I did it to liberate myself from the opinions of others.  At the time, my Marxist wife and I, always on the hunt for a better house with cheaper rent, had just moved for the 4th time in 2 years.  We had enlisted my family to help us move, but after carrying box after box after box of books into our new place, they suggested the next time around they would pool their resources and hire a moving company.  As we settled in for winter, we started using the fireplace in the big living room to reduce our heating bills.  One night we found ourselves in a discussion about excess baggage in our lives, both emotional and physical.  In my head I heard the words of her ex-boyfriend, a golden-haired hippie who often repeated Occam’s Razor like a mantra, that we shouldn't “complicate entities beyond necessity”.  Since my own mother was a person who hated clutter, and would throw something away as soon as look at it, my preference for travelling light came with my genes.  My wife was an army brat  who was used to moving, and unlike her parents, didn’t want the accouterments of bourgeois life.  She had saved no furniture from her turbulent life before we met, but in the ten years since she had earned her degree, she had hung onto her boxes of textbooks like they made her education legitimate.  She had paid good money for them. 

We started with these.  There was no second-hand bookstore that would accept the superseded textbooks except to be recycled for pulping, so they were the first to be consigned to the flames.  To be clear, it is difficult to start a fire with only books. One page at a time will burn, but tearing and scrunching up every page of a Bible-like tome would take an eternity, and we had boxes of the stuff to get rid of.  A crackling fire of Douglas fir split-logs was set roaring in the fireplace before the books went in, but the books could only be fed in one at a time, like spooning out food to a hungry baby.  Dumping a boxload of them onto the flames would have smothered the conflagration like a fire-blanket. 

The books we decided to burn were mostly works of criticism.  There was literary criticism, criticism of economic theories, social deconstructions, and cultural mis-readings.  The red line on which works had merit, vacillated when it came to choosing Ruskin’s writing on Venetian architecture or Sartre’s Saint Genet.  What was derivative and what was original?  It was just as well we weren’t burning the texts for heat because books don’t burn easily.  The title of Bradbury’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451 made it obvious why.  To stay alight, the books had to be poked open and flipped over like steaks on a grille.  Sometimes more firewood had to be piled on top to consume the resistant spines as if they were the heaviest bones of a cremated animal.  The next day there were a few fragments in the ash, puzzle-pieces of crumbling papyrus.  It was a liberating experience for both of us, who as educated people, had done what we were always taught was taboo.  We agreed that critiques of critiques add nothing new to the world and do nothing to solve real problems.  Tears would not be shed by anyone if the second-hand opinions were consigned to the flames.  In practical terms, we lightened our load for the next time we moved.

Since they were first published, books have always been under threat because they are vessels for ideas.  Every book contains its share of genies trying to emerge, but physical copies of books can be heavy and take up space.  These days, continents of ideas and images are accessible on the screens of mobile phones everywhere.  Who needs printed books?  Aficionados appreciate the feel and scent of a book, the handy shape of it, and the possible journey that it made land in their hands.  To them, books are treasures worth keeping. 

Bookworms aside, booksellers have had a difficult time in the digital age.  Some are still breathing, but they risk following video rental stores down the road of comedian’s jokes and closed up shop-fronts.  LP vinyl records have made a small comeback to satisfy devoted fans but vinyl will never return to the universality it once had as a vehicle for affordable musical propaganda.  Physical copies of books may soon follow the same path and what we once thought was commonplace, will exist no more.  Cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and CD’s, with their history of decline and disuse, will puzzle those who see them in technology museums.  Our ancestors probably predicted the demise of the book when paperbacks came along, but the opposite happened.  Because they were cheap and accessible, paperbacks were a publishing boom, but in this technological age, the content of a book, many books, can be stored on something the size of a fingernail. Traditional publishers are in trouble and have become nothing more than advertising agencies. Giant publishers swallow the small players, and now market a four format model, with hardcovers, paperbacks, audio books, and digital files.  Digital books will make hard copy volumes into curiosities for the type of collector who also likes the needle in the groove.

Assuming our way into the future, we could see all works of art being visible digitally and not available in any other form.  There may be a physical object somewhere, like the neatly illustrated manuscript of Alice in Wonderland in the British Library, but physical copies of it will not be extant. Libraries will not have a reason to exist except as digital hubs.  Global warming may incinerate most of the trees and there will be a paper shortage. The bundles of newspaper and cardboard boxes we threw away in our lifetimes will come back to haunt us.  Examples of the visual arts like Van Gogh, will be hidden in bomb-proof bunkers in Amsterdam, though images of the paintings will be widely viewable. 

Into this digital paradise may come a massive solar storm or a virus that consumes content as fast as it is uploaded.  If this happens there will be little evidence of what came before, no YouTube videos to explain how to change a bicycle tire or to explain the causes and context of the last great war.  

Mankind is notoriously bad at learning from history.   People don’t like to dwell on the past because the present is enough of a struggle/  When a war finishes it doesn’t last long as a topic of conversation. However, if our eggs of knowledge are all contained in one digital basket, there will be nothing left if some unknown force blows a hole in said basket. 

It could be argued that keeping original works of art or literature on such unstable materials as paper or canvas, also puts them at risk of being burned up in an old-fashioned fire. But if the New York Public Library goes up in smoke and Marx’s original notes for Das Kapital are destroyed, there are printed copies all over the globe that can pass on revolutionary ideas to any future generation who might be interested.  If digital storage goes blank, and we have disposed of all books as inconvenient encumbrances, there will be no works of long dead philosophers or artists to inspire future generations.  They will have to reinvent the wheel.

            In the late 1990’s the term burning was used for the technique of transferring information onto a CD.  Whether it was a CD or a cassette tape, all of the methods used for storing information were unstable.  When floppy discs first came out they were touted as the digital storage solution for all time.  Fifty years later I still hold onto a few floppies because my computer can’t read the information on them.  In the meantime, we have gone through cassette tapes, CD’s, iPods, USB sticks, and cloud storage. The methods change as quickly as engineers can invent them, but they are all at risk from major magnetic events.

     There have been times in history where books have been burned to stamp out what the state considered dangerous knowledge.  Arts and sciences may have been set back by these events because in the times when such autocratic ceremonies were carried out, the items burned may have been one of a kind. The library of Alexandria went up in smoke.  By the time the Nazis got to book burning, they could empty the libraries and bookshops, but there were already enough printed copies in other places that it was a foolish idea to think they could stamp out ideas they didn’t agree with. But book burning has a wider objective than just the destruction of paper.  It is carried out to cause fear in anyone who has knowledge of the content of the banned and burned books.   Those who have this knowledge are unwilling to come forward, because revealing information that is awkward for a strong-arm regime, can have catastrophic health outcomes for the whislte-blower.      

Another sort of book burning is still taking place in an ideologically divided America.  While nobody could resist the backlash of an outright book burning, books are being removed from schools and libraries if they are deemed contrary to Christian values, which for the conservative bodies who decide, include mention of gay and transgender people.  We had finally arrived at a place where kids were comfortable admitting they had two moms or two dads, but the holier-than-thou fascists have snatched that acceptance away from them.   Schools and libraries are not burning books in the street because there are more discreet ways of making them disappear. No actual flames are involved but the effect is the same.  It becomes taboo again to stray outside fixed gender stereotypes, a moral stance that does enormous harm to young people.  Many teens who commit suicide do so because they suspect they are gay and don’t want to be.  When truthful information about being gay, trans, or any other way, is not available to them, they lack the knowledge to make rational decisions, and tragedy is the result. 

Before the technology of the new millennium, there was a British royal scandal that the press agreed not to publish, but fax machines had become ubiquitous in offices, so copies of the French press were easily faxed to offices across the channel.  It became all but impossible to suppress news. Various dictator’s have tried to limit access to the web, but there are always ways for information to leak through. These days everyone has a camera phone and there are worldwide social platforms, so it’s difficult to keep information secret.   Images can find their way onto whatever platforms remain in a restricted country, and even if they are taken down within hours, they are first seen and passed on by sympathetic viewers.

There is danger in the widespread broadcasting of details of unremarkable lives.  We drown in a sea of irrelevant information about what the influencer had for breakfast, what they wore that day, and what streets they walked down.  It is like watching a work colleague's holiday photos.  It has minimal entertainment value and shoulders aside perspective and context.  “This is me on vacation” doesn’t have much to do with the location travelled to, except for how the weather treated the content creator.  The average social media influencer probably doesn’t know who Karl Marx was or the effect of his writings. They probably don’t know what dial telephones were or how music came out of a cassette tape.  If we pull the plug on the digital generation, not only do we take away their daily addiction to candy, but leave them with no framework that will help them get their feet back on the ground.  The maps that could tell them which way to go will have evaporated in the solar storm and paper maps will be out of print. 

Forced to be ever more mobile for work, citizens will have discarded their heavy loads of books and other weighty knowledge containers, so if the digital world is erased, records of what existed before will be wiped clean. Those who still have memories will tell tales to their children about transcendent paintings, inspiring sculptures, and magic books that opened portals in the human brain.  Luckily a grandmother or two will still remember what foods to harvest and how to make bread, but the few minds that remember there was a theory of relativity or a theory of surplus value based on labour, will have to wrack their old brains to remember what it was about.   Those who have become media dependent will be inconsolable.  Their lives will hardly be worth living. 

Nature abhors a vacuum, so after the deluge, a figure may come along to fill the blank minds with twisted ideological claptrap, and the empty headed sheep will be happy to follow.  This time there will be no books left to burn, but like Hitler’s Germany or Ray Bradbury’s dystopia, the hunted will be the passers-on of ideas that are contrary to the new regime’s plans.  Orwell warned us that when nobody remembers history, the propaganda machine can make wrong out of right and vice versa.  Like dogs, humans can be trained to hate and kill each other.  It has happened before, and given the spiral form of the galaxy that rules everything, it will come round again.