Censorship by Commission

The belief that the state or collective has the right to [censor] is an abomination; it is nothing less than the dogma that the state owns every individual, body and soul, and has the right to torture or maim those individuals as it pleases.  –  “Crippling Thought”

Every so often I realize that I need a new tag for some increasingly-common kind of article; very often I choose to repurpose an old one that isn’t currently being used.  Last week I saw a couple of articles about a trend in the same states which are most aggressively attempting to eliminate all ideas, concepts, words, and images their rulers dislike, and they reminded me  of Eric Hoffer’s observation that “An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish.  Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.”  Thomas Jefferson expressed much the same idea, writing “Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.”  Florida, Texas, and other states run by god-king wannabes understand this, which is why they’re not only trying to eliminate thoughts they don’t like, but also to cram young heads so full of nonsense that there is no room for actual learning in those heads when their victims mature enough to escape their direct control:

In 2022, Florida began indoctrinating public school teachers with Christian Nationalism in the hopes that they would spread the misinformation to their students…Thousands of teachers have now gone through the program, and there’s no telling how many of them went back and spread those lies to their students…the workshops were “developed with the help of Hillsdale College,” a conservative Christian school in Michigan known for spreading historical…misinformation…the workshops…clearly endorsed the Christian Nationalist beliefs that conservative Christianity is the bedrock of our country, that church/state separation as we know it is a myth, and that the Christian God gave us the rights we have…“It was very skewed,” said Barbara Segal, a 12th-grade government teacher at Fort Lauderdale High School.  “There was a very strong Christian fundamentalist way toward analyzing different quotes and different documents”…veteran educators would no doubt be able to sniff out the bullshit.  But…newer, younger teachers [might] have no clue they were being lied to…This was all about indoctrinating the next generation of teachers, so they could inadvertently indoctrinate the next generation of students…

Texas’s approach is far more subtle, because it does have one foot in the truth, expressed by Texas’ top education bureaucrat thus: “If you’re reading classic works of American literature, there are often religious allusions in that literature.”  Genuine Western cultural literacy absolutely does require Biblical literacy, but it also requires mythological and historical literacy Texas’ new curriculum specifically eschews in favor of its Christian nationalist slant.  As Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said: “It is reasonable to devote some attention to…[the Bible, bu]t sometimes the legitimate reason of cultural literacy is used as a smokescreen to hide religious and ideological agendas.”  But overt or subtle, the strategies of both states remind me of this passage from one of Lovecraft’s atheist essays:

We all know that any emotional bias — irrespective of truth or falsity — can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young…If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them.  The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.