Libricide! . . . Or, Warm Your Hands In Fifty Shades of Abuse

If you haven't heard about Fifty Shades of Grey yet you're either living under a rock, or you're illiterate.  If its the former, you should probably come on out, I hear it's cold out there.  If it's the latter then I'm really impressed you're reading my blog.  Regardless, Fifty Shades has sparked heated controversy.  You know what I'm talking about, you either love it, or you hate it.  But as The Independent, an Irish newspaper reports, a UK-based women's shelter, Wearside Women in Need, has decided they hate it enough to destroy it. 

They've organized a book burning, scheduled for November 5.  They claim the book glorifies abuse, the objectification of women and normalizes such behavior.  They even liken the behavior of sadist Christopher Grey to British serial killer Fred West.  In response, they feel their only course of action is to burn what copies they can of E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey. 

Random House, the book's publisher, is quick to point out that all depictions of behaviors are carried out by consenting adults.

The usual suspects have been trotted out to condemn the book burning.  Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the book burnings of Alexandria, of the Qin Dynasty, and more recently, of the Nazis.  These are powerful indictments against the Wearside Women in Need, and I think there's a legitimate usage of powerful figures to oppose book burning, or, as the article points out, biblioclasm.

The free market of ideas only works as long as every idea has its day in court.  Everyone is allowed to express themselves and, if the system really works, the best ideas rise to the top, are adopted and the weaker ideas simply die out.  This is one of the fundamentals of democracy, and justly, any talk of book-burning, or the genocide of ideas, is the antithesis of democracy.  But trying to put the genie back in the bottle, if you'll allow me to blur the metaphor, is futile.  The box is opened, the horse is out of the barn.  Whatever metaphor you'd like, the idea is out there and burning a book isn't going to put the world back the way it was.  All they're really doing is stoking the flames of curiosity.

But maybe that's their goal.  The article points out that maybe this is just a ploy to garner attention to their cause.  In that case, shame on them, for inciting indignation for even a worthy cause.  We tell the story of Peter and the Wolf as a cautionary story for exactly this reason.  The threat of a book-burning is a terrible thing, and ought not to be bandied about for political reasons.

Regardless, I deplore the burning of books in every instance.  The suppression of an idea by violence is anathema to the ideals of freedom and ought to be deplored.