The phrase “intellectual freedom” is widely used to describe the state of affairs in which each human being has the freedom to think, say, write, and promulgate any idea or belief. In the United States, that freedom is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” There is, of course, no such thing as an absolute freedom outside the pages of fiction and utopian writings; for that reason, intellectual freedom is constrained by law in every jurisdiction. Here the initial and simple concept becomes tricky because, of course, there are just laws and unjust laws, and to put it simply, times and opinions change.
Over the centuries, laws have banned certain kinds of political, social, sexual, literary, and religious expression. To complicate matters, some of those laws have been at the national level, some at the state level, and some at the local level, and they have often been at variance each with the other. Over the centuries, one or more of blasphemy (divergent views on religious doctrines), sedition (expression of views in opposition to governments), and obscenity (unlawful sexual expression) has been the target of government restriction. It seems that, today in the United States, only sexual expression deemed to be “obscene” is banned by law and—theoretically, at least—all political, literary, social, and religious expression is free of government restraint. It does not help that “obscenity” has never been defined clearly and hence has been ruled to be a matter of local mores and values, so that something that circulates freely in Greenwich Village may be forbidden in a small rural California community.
It is noteworthy that the American Library Association has never defined “intellectual freedom,” particularly given the existence of ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom (reason, in and of itself, to be a member of ALA) and given the fact that ALA has made many statements and taken many positions on many aspects of the topic. The most concise statement on the topic is to be found in the Association’s Intellectual Freedom Manual:
The First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are integral to American librarianship. They are the basis of the concept librarians call intellectual freedom. Intellectual freedom accords to all library users the right to seek and receive information on all subjects from all points of view without restriction and without having the subject of one’s interest examined or scrutinized by others.1
For libraries, intellectual freedom begins with opposition to censorship of books and other library materials—hence the activities and publications centered on the annual Banned Books Week. From there the topic expands to include ALA’s stand on the library user’s right to gain access to all library materials, which, in turn, is connected to the librarian’s duty to make all library materials available to everyone. The librarian not only has a duty to library users but also has rights that are personal to her or him. Those rights include—but are not limited to—freedom of expression, the democratic process in the workplace, and the right to pursue any chosen lifestyle. Related to all this is the concept of the library as an advocate of intellectual freedom. That notion is not without elements of controversy, because it sets up the clash between those who believe in advocacy and the minority who think that the library should be neutral in all social conflicts—including those that relate to the First Amendment.
It can readily be seen that intellectual freedom begins as a question of a basic and, to many, inalienable human right that is opposed in principle only by those who do not believe in social equality and democracy; but it soon leaves that relatively simple field of argument. The fact is that many quarrels about intellectual freedom are not between those who are for it and those who are against it. They are often between people who believe in different applications of intellectual freedom, while all professing to be for it. There are those who are “absolutists” and would deny no one the right to create, disseminate, say, see, or read anything at all. There are those who agree broadly with that notion, but would restrict access to certain materials by certain groups—for example, children. There are also those who use the “protection of children” as a stalking horse for their comprehensive censoring agenda. Therefore, in considering intellectual freedom issues, we should always be aware that we are not dealing with good and evil—though both may well be present—but with a complexity of views, many of which are sincerely held. After all, the debate over “protecting” children from the evils of cyberspace is about what is best for children. Some may believe that the intellectual development that comes from free access to all recorded knowledge and information is worth the risks. Others wish to shelter their children from unpleasant reality. Even the absolutist will admit that cyberspace can be a very unpleasant place. Yet others wish to restrict the reading and viewing habits of all children, including those for which they have no direct responsibility.
Librarians believe in intellectual freedom because it is as natural to us, and as necessary to us, as the air that we breathe. Censorship is anathema to us because it inhibits arbitrarily our role in life—to make the recorded knowledge and information of humankind freely available to everyone, regardless of faith or the lack of it, ethnicity, gender, age, or any other of the categories that divide us one from the other. I strongly believe we should hold fast to intellectual freedom and carry out our tasks without reference to our own opinions or the opinions of those who want to restrict free access to knowledge. I used to be an academic librarian, and, as such, was comparatively better off than fellow librarians in other areas. After all, academic librarians work in institutions that are overwhelmingly dedicated (in principle if not always in action) to the idea of academic freedom; tend to work for people who share that ethic; and are usually not professionally isolated. Compare that context to the lonely battles that are fought by librarians in small, rural public libraries and by solitary school librarians battling obscurantist school boards. If you look at the lists of challenged and banned books that are issued each year, you will see that those are the people in the front lines. All the more reason to support our library associations’ offices of intellectual freedom in the great work they do on our behalf to protect this most important professional value.
Most library associations and related professional bodies have a statement on intellectual freedom that exhorts their members to apply the concept of intellectual freedom in all the activities of the library. One of the best of these is the Canadian Library Association’s statement, which reads:
• All persons in Canada have the fundamental right, as embodied in the nation’s Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to have access to all expressions of knowledge, creativity and intellectual activity, and to express their thoughts publicly. This right to intellectual freedom, under the law, is essential to the health and development of Canadian society.
• Libraries have a basic responsibility for the development and maintenance of intellectual freedom.
• It is the responsibility of libraries to guarantee and facilitate access to all expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity, including those which some elements of society may consider to be unconventional, unpopular or unacceptable. To this end, libraries shall acquire and make available the widest variety of materials.
• It is the responsibility of libraries to guarantee the right of free expression by making available all the library’s public facilities and services to all individuals and groups who need them.
• Libraries should resist all efforts to limit the exercise of these responsibilities while recognizing the right of criticism by individuals and groups.
• Both employees and employers in libraries have a duty, in addition to their institutional responsibilities, to uphold these principles.2
I have pointed out previously that intellectual freedom is a complex matter with many dimensions. In practical application in libraries, the use of even the CLA’s innocent seeming admonitions can and do create problems. There are no problems for the absolutist and the censor, of course. The first would allow everybody to have access to everything. The latter would choose what is made available and to whom, based entirely on individual preferences and convictions. For the rest of us, the world is infinitely more complex and one to be negotiated in the light of both principle and practicalities. Here are some real cases:
• A school board orders two novels on contemporary Latino life to be withdrawn from a class reading list and limits their availability in the school library.
• A public library board is taken over by an organized group of conservative evangelicals that orders filtering software to be installed on all library public terminals used to give online access for both adults and children.
• A group of citizens calls for a nineteenth-century work of literature to be withdrawn from the library because of race-insensitive terminology.
• A religious group donates copies of its publications and then cries “censorship” when they are deemed outside the scope of the collection and not added to the shelves.
• An anarchist group wants to meet monthly in a public meeting room in the library and display publications calling for militant opposition to the government.
Suppose that your work life, job, and even career may depend on how you deal with these issues. This is the point at which one might well see a clash of values. There is the value of intellectual freedom in the first instance, but there is also the value of service to a community. You will notice that most of these real-life examples occurred in small towns, school districts, and public library systems. A person who genuinely believes (and with good reason) that she is personally important to the health of library services in a small community may well feel inclined to make small accommodations to the forces pressing on her in order to preserve the greater good of the library and its users. If you are inclined to decry those small accommodations, please weigh your own circumstances against those of the librarian in question. Please also consider the value of taking a stand against the value of a useful, productive career. Let us also consider this practical question: If the librarian in these cases stands on her principles and is fired, whom do you think the people who fired her will hire? Do you think it would be another First Amendment absolutist? I will yield to no one in my admiration for those who take the moral high ground and I would never advocate a spineless truckling to power, but I do want to make the following fundamental points. Life is never as uncomplicated as it appears from a distance. Small sacrifices may well, on occasion, benefit the majority of library users. One does not have to be perfect to be able to live with one’s conscience.
The American Library Association and the Freedom to Read Foundation have been waging the just war against censorship for many decades. They have stood for freedom of access to recorded knowledge and information for everyone, without regard to their age, gender, ethnicity, religion, or any other distinguishing characteristic. Many of the battles fought by ALA and its members center on the relatively simple (and constitutionally protected) issues of the freedom of the press. It says it right there in the First Amendment, and, though some can and do argue that there should be limits on what you can print and read, the overall issue is very clear to most Americans, and, if only in the long run, the good guys usually win. If only the Founding Fathers had the prescience to include “online freedom.”
When you think of all the battles waged over freedom of the press, banned books, and censorship in the print age, it is not difficult to believe that we may come to look back nostalgically on that time because of the appalling complexities introduced by digital resources of all kinds. Despite the digital divide, almost the entire country has the ability to gain access to online resources. Schoolrooms and public libraries contain computer terminals and give Wi-Fi access more or less as a matter of course. Many children have ready access to smartphones and tablets. The widespread use of cyberspace is surpassed only by hype about all-digital futures. The world is awash in online information, misinformation, disinformation, opinion, vituperation, tweeting, trolling, and solipsistic disquisitions. The products of established journalistic sources and scholars jostle with those of pornographers, spinners, bloggers, basement-dwellers, mountebanks, fraudsters, and hucksters.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that those who favor censorship in general are much exercised about cyberspace and advocate measures to prevent unlimited access to those resources, particularly by children and young adults. It is difficult, when the censorious winds blow so hard, to step back and have some historical insight, but it is well worth doing. Almost every new means of communication in the past century and a half has been greeted as being, in itself, an assault on the morals of the nation, particularly the young. (I write “almost” because I cannot recall newspaper stories about microfilms destroying the morals of the young.) Just think of the havoc that silent and pre-Code talking pictures wrought on the flappers; the awful toll on the morals of young, unmarried people dancing to gramophone records; the “howling wilderness” of television; and the modem evils of misogynistic gangsta rap and movies that drive children to homicidal mania. There was even a popular book in the 1950s that denounced the corrosive effect of the “hidden messages” contained in comic books3 (the same comic books that now supply the screenplays of half of the Hollywood movies made today). Violent movies are not new, but pervasive online access is, and librarians have to deal with hyped-up attacks on online resources and those who give access to them. In the words of one commentator, “Children have always looked for forbidden books, magazines, and other media, and guardians of public morals have often blamed such sources for a decline in juvenile behavior.”4
Let us face an important fact. When censors and filterers talk about “culture” and “moral decay,” they mean the dreadful duo: sex and violence. Those, too, are nuanced. To some people, any depiction of, or writing about, sex is offensive. To others, it is only images and writing about sexual variations that offends. Then there is the Tarantino Problem—which, stated succinctly, is: If violent images are harmful, why is the violence in Quentin Tarantino’s films acceptable? Because Tarantino is a cult director? Surely, the example of violence in a critically acclaimed film is as harmful as the violence of a trashy videogame. If it is not, then the often advanced “cause and effect” argument is confounded or, at least, shown as the unbearable complexity it is.
Every “threat” posed by a new means of communication has been met by calls for legislation to make the world—especially children—safe from the perceived iniquity. The federal Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and Neighborhood Children’s Internet Protection Act (NCIPA) went into effect in 2004 and 2002 respectively. They both mandate filters to block “visual depictions” that are obscene (as defined by law), are child pornography (as defined by law), and are “harmful to minors” (persons who are not yet 17) in that the depiction:
A. taken as a whole and with respect to minors, appeals to a prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion;
B. depicts, describes, or represents in a patently offensive way with respect to what is suitable for minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual acts, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals; and
C. taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value as to minors.
Failure to abide by the prescription to install filters that block such depictions is punished by withdrawal of federal money available through the Library Services and Technology Act, Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and on the Universal Service discount program known as the E-rate (Public Law 106–554).
Thus we have moral panic enshrined in a law written in language that a country lawyer could take apart in seconds. Let us disregard for the moment that children and minors have First Amendment rights—and all filters will block constitutionally protected speech for minors, as well as potentially block that speech for adults—to contemplate, for the moment, a mind-set that thinks sixteen-year-olds need protection from having an interest in nudity and sex—an interest that legislators call “prurient” but that will seem to most to be both inevitable and normal. The filters mandated by these laws are devices as ineffective as they are philosophically offensive.
Before going on to discuss filters as such, let us see what they are designed to achieve. The central concern of those who genuinely wish to protect children (as opposed to lifelong censors who are using the Internet as the latest weapon to achieve their social aims) is that children may see or read images and texts that are morally harmful. It is very easy to find stuff online, advertently or inadvertently, that is aesthetically repulsive, inherently sordid, or exploitative of humans. None of those constitutes an offense to morality—unless, that is, you believe that your own morality is or should be universal. The latter is only acceptable to those who use statements beginning “The American people believe . . . ,” thinking that they are equipped to decide what the majority of this vast, diverse nation believes on every issue. I do not eat meat. Pictures of factory farms and of meat being cooked are repulsive to me. Does that mean that I should do everything in my power to stop others (who may or may not eat meat) from seeing those pictures? That may seem absurd, but is it really any more absurd than me seeking to stop people from seeing pictures of people engaged in sexual variations that do not appeal to me?
Then there is the question of the assumed superiority of those who would censor. The idea is that such people can read texts or view images that will have no effect on them but will be “harmful” to other, presumably more suggestible, people. Someone once defined a censor as someone who does not want you to know or read what he knows or has read. Could it be that the effects of texts and images on the individual psyche are simply incalculable—as unpredictable as any other effect on individual behavior? Anyone who is honest with herself will acknowledge that some sexual or violent images and texts stay in the mind for years and exercise power over that mind. These are images and texts that have been ignored or forgotten in minutes by millions of viewers and readers but, for some reason, hold sway in one mind for a lifetime. It is difficult for me to believe that online violent or sexual images do much good to anyone, but it is equally difficult to imagine that they do much harm either. Millions of people around the world have watched the horrific violence of many mainstream Hollywood movies, but the worst that happened to 99.999 percent of them was that they wasted their time.
Japanese popular culture is saturated with vividly violent and searingly sexual images and texts—manifest, among other places, online. Japan’s level of violence is lower by many magnitudes than the level of violence in the United States. Further, there is no evidence at all that sexual mores in Japan are inferior to those in the United States. What does that tell us? First, that Japanese society and culture are very different from the society and culture of the United States. However, it also tells us that exposure to violent and sexual images and texts is not a determining factor for the nature of a society. Denmark and the Netherlands are well known for their permissive attitudes toward, among other things, sexual writings and images. Is there anyone who would seriously argue that Danes and the Dutch are morally inferior, as a whole, to American people? Well, yes—those who think that sexual writings and images are inherently wrong. In other words, the argument has turned in on itself, and we are no longer discussing the “harm” that is alleged to be done, but the imposition of one morality on those who may or may not share it.
ALA has rendered itself unpopular with a vocal minority by stating a constitutional fact: children and young adults share the First Amendment rights of those over age eighteen. (One would have thought this might be obvious in states in which, under certain conditions, people can marry at age sixteen.) Even if you believe that viewing and reading can harm those under eighteen, you still have to come to terms with the necessity of abridging those rights in order to prevent that “harm.” That being so, it seems to me that it is important to define that harm and gauge its extent. There have been thousands of studies of the effects of television watching on children. (Television watching and online use are very similar activities, though the latter seems different because of its potential for interactivity—despite the fact that most online use is as passive as television viewing—and because it is the newer, “hotter” medium.) Many of the studies reinforce the obvious—that spending many hours a day watching programs with little intellectual content and social value is not good for the minds and bodies of children. Some seek to show that watching programs with sexual or violent content can do psychological harm. The evidence for the latter is much less conclusive. Many researchers believe that there is no direct and strong correlation between acts of violence and watching acts of violence on television and that television programs are a minor part of a web of social factors that lead to antisocial behavior by some children. “On balance, it seems likely that any relationship that may exist between watching television violence and perpetrating actual violence is likely to be a complex one, and a number of contributing factors must be considered.”5 In addition, it appears that children are more affected by the violence they see in news programs than in fictional representations of violence.6 There are numerous studies of the effects on children and adolescents of violence in online music videos and video-games. They do not add up to a consensus on the nature of the harm or even if there is any harm.
If the connection is difficult to discern between violence on television, in videogames, or online and violence in life, how much more difficult is it to define the connection between online sex and sex on television and . . . what? Most children and adolescents are intensely interested in sex and seem to have a natural ability to cope with the level of truth about sex that is appropriate to their age. Many sexual writings, scenes, and images found online or on television are tawdry and unedifying. What else is new? Most portrayals of anything online and on television are tawdry and unedifying. No, the objection to children having access to sexual materials through modern media is the same as the decades-old objection to sexual content in books, films, and other material. It is rooted in a morality and an ideology that wishes to protect the “innocence” of children from the “corruption” of sex. It is the duty and obligation of parents to guide and advise their children in their reading and viewing habits; they—and they alone—should police those habits in the light of their own morality and convictions. I would much rather young people were reading The joy of sex than listening to violent rap, watching slasher movies, or playing violent videogames, but that is my morality, and I would neither seek to ban nor seek to impose anything on the basis of it.
The most commonly proposed remedy to protect the young from the online ills perceived and actual ills is called “filtering.” Filtering programs purport to screen out “undesirable” sites. Filtering advocates are those who wish to make those undesirable sites unavailable. They are opposed by those who claim that filtering is an unconstitutional infringement on the liberty of the individual. With all due respect, I would maintain that this enduring clash is completely irrelevant. The truth is that filtering systems do not work, and they never will work. They do not work because they are based on the same keyword searching using an uncontrolled vocabulary that gives you 648,332 “relevant hits” after an online search. Any librarian with knowledge of bibliographic control knows that controlled vocabularies and close classification are the only way to ensure precision and comprehensive recall. The mirror image is that the only way to have filtering systems that work would be to catalogue and classify cyberspace fully. ALA is on record as opposing filtering (principally on First Amendment rather than practical grounds) and has, therefore, drawn the ire of would-be cybercensors.
“Dr. Laura” [Schlessinger], now mercifully forgotten, was a leading figure in the social atavism movement. Unlike many of the mail-order “Reverends” and “Doctors” who infest that movement, she actually had a respectable, if irrelevant to her public persona, academic background.7 She made a minor career out of attacking ALA as “smut peddlers” and the like before her fifteen minutes of fame were up. Unfortunately, she has not lacked successors, and ALA—a body devoted, inter alia, to First Amendment rights and intellectual freedom—is still being attacked as a promoter of pornography by the ignorant and the malign (not mutually exclusive categories).
ALA has been staunch in its opposition to filters, but it is not easy to deal with what is, fundamentally, an irrational proposal. Of course, we need to fight this battle on philosophical and moral grounds. To quote an ALA report:
Given increased demand and the mission to provide free and open access to information for all, libraries find that Internet filtering poses fundamental challenges to intellectual freedom. Filtering also conflicts directly with core professional values of librarians as articulated in ALA’s Library Bill of Rights. As Internet filters, by design, block access to content, not only are they incompatible with library values, but for many librarians they also constitute censorship.8
We also need to fight filters on practical and political grounds. First, it is essential to make the point about the inutility of filters. It is certainly not difficult to demonstrate that blocking by keywords does not work. Most online users understand that keyword searching is ineffective—regular encounters with thousands of irrelevant and marginally “relevant hits” using search engines are the background noise of the online life. All we need to do is to demonstrate the reason why such events happen (the use of keyword full-text searching) and then to make the connection with exactly the same technique used in filters. Second, we need to continue to put out positive messages about the use and limitations of online sources, the need for parental involvement in the use of libraries by minors, and the need for minors to read more books. Third, we should continue to emphasize that filters fail to block the materials at which they are aimed and do block things that are constitutionally protected. For example, a Consumer reports study of Internet filters (June 2005) found that
while Internet blockers have gotten better at blocking pornography, the best also tend to block many sites they should not. . . . [and] found the software to be less effective at blocking sites promoting hatred, illegal drugs or violence . . . The best porn blockers were heavy-handed against [i.e., blocked] sites about health issues, sex education, civil rights and politics.9
The last thing we need to do is to squander the accumulated capital of goodwill that libraries and librarians have built up over the years—particularly not in a fight in which librarians can be portrayed as the enemies of morality and as ivory-tower purists eager to sacrifice children and families (not to mention our colleagues in many small libraries) on the First Amendment altar. The opponents of intellectual freedom managed to demonize the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1970s and 1980s, partly by misrepresenting that excellent organization’s beliefs and activities.
This is no war of shadows without consequences, nor is it a war between good (ALA) and evil (the Filterati). ALA does act from good motives and is philosophically, morally, and intellectually on the correct side. The filter fans may be led by demagogues and bullies, but they include many people holding sincere convictions and with serious concerns about the culture and the future of their children. Those people can be reached and should be the targets of our arguments about the filter fallacy, the need for parents to participate in library use, and the uses and value of literacy. We should also have a good deal of sympathy for our colleagues in the kinds of communities in which the filter wars are being fought. Many of them simply cannot understand why those of us in different circumstances appear not to know about the pressures that are being applied.
Filtering is just the latest front in the censorship wars that have been going on for decades. Despite this, we must never forget that filtering is a powerful symbolic representation of the real fears of many people who are not particularly ideological. On their behalf and on the behalf of colleagues caught in the filtering cross fire, we, as a profession, must devise an effective and successful strategy to counter filtering. That strategy will do the following:
• Stress the positive contributions that librarians and libraries make to society.
• Make reasonable accommodations to concerned parents.
• Demonstrate the ineffectiveness of filtering.
• Stress the importance of reading.
• Stress the constitutional underpinnings of the First Amendment rights of children and adults.
• Stress parental duties to guide, advise, and monitor the reading and viewing habits of children.
• Use all available public relations and marketing techniques to get these messages to the widest possible public.
We should use advertising and all other means of mass communication to build on the generally favorable view that the public has of libraries and librarians. We have a good story to tell and have earned the respect and esteem of the public. We will add to that respect and esteem if we manage to persuade the majority of parents that we are reasonable. We need to place great emphasis on the importance of sustained reading to intellectual development. A child reading a good book is the positive answer to the fears to which filtering and the V-chip are negative answers. We should never yield our belief that children have rights, too, and that those rights include the right to free enquiry. Surely we could find common cause with most concerned parents in stressing the preeminent role of parents as guides and mentors. None of this will persuade the censors and culture warriors, but it will reach the sensible mass of people as a counter to their propaganda. If it is a propaganda war, then let us fight it as such.
Libraries and censors have been around for centuries. The grounds change, the causes change, media of communication change, but the idea of liberty of thought and expression is the same as it was in the age of Tom Paine.
1. American Library Association. Intellectual freedom manual, eighth edition. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2010.
2. Canadian Library Association / Association canadienne des bibliothèques. Position statement on intellectual freedom (approved June 27, 1974; amended November 17, 1983, and November 18, 1985). www.cla.ca/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Position_Statements&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=3047 (consulted August 26, 2014).
3. Wertham, Frederic. The seduction of the innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954.
4. Dessart, George. “Barring Rambo from the Potemkin Village.” Television quarterly, volume 28, number 3 (Summer 1996) pages 37–41.
5. Hough, Kirsten J. and Erwin, Philip K. “Children’s attitudes toward violence on television.” Journal of psychology, volume 131, number 4 (July 1997) pages 411–416.
6. Walma van der Molen, Juliette H. Pediatrics, volume 113, issue 6 (June 2004) pages 1771–1775.
7. A PhD in physiology from Columbia University.
8. Batch, Kristen. Fencing out knowledge. Washington, DC: ALA OITP, 2014. www.ala.org/offices/sites/ala.org.offices/files/content/oitp/publications/issuebriefs/cipa_report.pdf (consulted September 13, 2014).
9. American Library Association. “Filters and filtering.” www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/filtering (consulted November 12, 2014).