largerPublic Libraries Have A Stake
Libraries should remain free to have the facts
By Dr. William Taber, NYSALB Director
The core of public library service is to provide truth -- in the form of knowledge and information. Since the world is so complex, we as individuals cannot experience directly everything that we need to know, and we must depend upon the nourishment to the human mind that libraries help to provide equally to all in the population without regard to their wealth or power. Through these services, public libraries inherently are committed to certain social and cultural values of honesty, individual freedom and integrity, rationality, good will towards others, and equality of opportunity -- all important prerequisites to democracy and to a free society.
Our public libraries are public institutions. However, this does not mean that they can stand mute when the basic values which they serve are threatened by government or by political movements or by any other group's authoritarianism. Public libraries can exist and can function only within the structure of a larger society that supports these values -- and this structure includes the political and governmental climates which dominate at any particular time. The nature of the times is revealed in many ways.
For example, one of the pictures on my computer's screensaver is the photograph of flag draped coffins neatly in line within the hold of an aircraft returning our dead from Iraq -- meticulously cared for by two soldiers. It is a quiet moment of reality, and, when it appears on my screen for half a minute every week or so, it gives me a moment of pause and reflection. It is clearly part of the truth, and, like all truth, it threatens only those who (for whatever their own purposes or fears) insist upon controlling the knowledge and thoughts of others. As you probably know, that image is nearly criminalized, those who released it were punished, and releases of further photos were banned by the administration in a flurry of passionate rhetoric that such a photograph of the coffins was somehow disrespectful and disturbing to the families. Consequently, our losses continue to be shipped back unseen by the public and possibly out of the public mind. (Finally, after much criticism of the administration's restrictive actions, family members have been granted permission to view the arrivals.)
I have seen the dead arrive from World War II and later from Korea and Vietnam. The returns were a mixture of sorrow and pride ... and sometimes anger. But they were done with the careful dignity and public recognition of their sacrifice that characterizes our military's respect for its dead, and they were not seen officially as shameful and dangerous.
This vignette, minor though it may be, sticks in my mind as a symbol of the whole fabric of manipulation that this country has suffered and which, if truly unchecked, may eventually smother any hope of a fair, equitable and free nation for the majority of our people.
Fortunately, the domestic iron curtain that has been built in recent years is still full of holes. Through these holes a flood of literature has emerged (on lists of most borrowed library books and on best seller lists) that may yet save our future by awaking the public. Such glimpses by whistle-blowers and by researchers into the true purposes, thinking, and tactics of the groups presently in power are frightening, but they prove that freedom of inquiry and expression is not dead, only bruised and reeling.
The public library community has been part of the self-correcting power of our country. It has been a leader in defending individual rights to know and to think. When newspaper articles describe libraries' opposition to censorship, to ideological or religious control, or to attempts to co-opt it as a kind of police informant, they often refer to that opposition as coming from a “surprising” or “unlikely” source. But that source is not at all unlikely; for the public library is founded precisely upon those values that I mentioned earlier (honesty, rationality, equal access to accurate knowledge, individual freedom of thought, and the good of all the community, not just a few). These are the values that it must defend, not just for itself but for the whole country of which it is a part.
Librarians, patrons, and trustees have an obligation to take threats to those values very seriously and to do what they can to preserve them. The only question is, “How?”
We can rebuff attempts to destroy principles that are important to our library and to our country (if we value a free and open democracy) only by opposing the very people who mount such attacks from positions of power.
By their actions, these are people for whom “knowledge” is not something to share with other humans but rather something to hoard or hide for one's own secret advantage of power or profit. These are people for whom “freedom” means only a license to use nearly any means by which to dominate others to one's own benefit (and to the others' loss). These are people for whom “argument” does not mean the exchange of views for the purpose of finding the truth or reaching an accord, but rather the use of power to control and to prevent the airing of any other views. Underlying all these attitudes is an absolutist sense of moral certainty and superiority that dismisses with contempt anyone else's willingness to consider alternatives, to question premises, or to critically examine promised alternatives. When people with these attitudes have seized power, whether that power is based upon huge wealth or upon control of government, the freedom of all is in danger.
A democracy has to tolerate such people and their thinking, but it will not endure as a democracy if it tolerates their hold on the free flow of information. Librarians must continue to work for and encourage the free and open availability of information to all those who seek it.
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