You may or may not like Elon Musk, but he has a point when he says: “Free speech only matters when someone you don’t like can say something you don’t like.” After all, tolerating the things others say that we agree with is easy. Can someone you hate make a statement you also hate? That’s Elon’s bar for free speech.
Whatever form of censorship you might find acceptable or even reasonable, Musk says, sooner or later, that very censorship might be turned on you—and that’s not a risk we should take, not individually and definitely not collectively. Perhaps one of the most tragic forms of censorship? Banning books.
Even today, right now, there are books banned in America—one of the most forward-thinking countries—that are not just good or interesting but all-time literary classics. Shakespeare’s works are censored in Florida for being too steamy and profane. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is banned in many schools because the n-word appears 200 times. Meanwhile, The Catcher in the Rye was one of the most banned books ever since its release in 1951 all the way up to the 90s, and even today many schools skip it. Too depressing, some teachers think.
Nowadays, we even try to ban books years later simply because the author said something we don’t like. J. K. Rowling, anyone? There’s something to be said for holding celebrities accountable, of course, but when cancel culture tries to rewrite history after the fact, that’s troublesome.
Books, of all things, least require censorship to begin with. Why? Because bad books don’t spread. Reading one is a hard sell for most people. So unless the book has meaning to many, it’ll never reach the masses. And once it does? If a work of art achieves that kind of velocity, who are we to try and stop it just because it makes us feel uncomfortable?
Oscar Wilde felt the full force of censorship both while he was alive and long after he had passed. His editor deleted 500 words from the first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray without his knowledge. An uncensored version didn’t appear until 2011, and in the 120 years until then, both the book and Wilde’s life had been subject of controversy after controversy.
Ironically, it is in that very work that Wilde told us, with prophetic foresight, everything we must know about free speech when it comes to books: “The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” Thank god his editor didn’t censor this line.