Who, As a People, Do We Want to Be?

A Wisconsin school board removed 444 books from its middle and high school libraries this week, pending investigation of claims from an irate parent. Don’t let that detail go unremarked: claims from an irate parent, singular. That’s the point America’s public discourse has reached, where outspoken individuals with bad attitudes arbitrate books for entire communities of learners. Remember, libraries are often the only book access disadvantaged students even have.

Earlier this year, a story got traction on social media: the recent spate of mass book bannings is orchestrated by nucleus of serial accusation-mongers. The story broke in the Washington Post (behind a paywall, sadly), before getting reproduced, with germane editorial insertions, in mainly left-leaning aggregator sites like RawStory and Vox. As few as eleven serial bellyachers in a representative sample filed sixty percent of actionable complaints with school boards.

Blue Facebook and Blue Xitter highlighted which parents—or frequently, “parents”—filed these complaints, and which books they rejected. The books overwhelmingly foregrounded queer characters; most of the remainder dealt with race and bigotry in America. They’re trying to squelch free ideas, the refrain goes; and, in close harmony, history never looks well upon book banners. Comparisons inevitably arise to the Nazi regime’s wanton destruction of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.

Fair dues, perhaps. But the leftists making this argument are hardly free-speech absolutists themselves. They wouldn’t tolerate these same libraries stocking, say, The Turner Diaries or 120 Days of Sodom. These examples are extreme to the point of satire, obviously, but the point stands: everybody will agree that some books (and other artifacts, like Confederate statues) don’t belong in public spaces. We only dispute which books and artifacts must go.

I’ve recently had leftist colleagues derail entire discussions over somebody’s use of outdated terms. I’m not talking about when somebody centers their discussion on offensive content, or uses actual slurs like the N-word. I mean specifically examples like the fact that “handicapped” has fallen on disfavor, and advocates prefer “disabled”—a word I was taught to abjure in the 1980s, because it spotlighted what somebody lacked over what they were.

Already I anticipate conservative friends chortling over “political correctness gone amok.” But the right is hardly innocent of wanting to amend language to expunge offense. Recent attempts to turn “Boomer” and “cisgender” into cusswords have turned unintentionally hilarious. The attempt to forbid certain words or turn language into a minefield of hurt feelings only differs on one point: exactly whose feelings we believe deserve protected from offense.

In the past, I’ve described myself as a free-speech absolutist. But like most absolutists, I’m far from absolute. Certain language doesn’t deserve protection. The Supreme Court has declared that, First Amendment notwithstanding, obscenity and incitement to violence aren’t protected speech. We can agree these forms of speech don’t deserve protection because they cause material, calculable harm. And in causing harm, they cross the line from “speech” into “action.”

Beyond the harm standard, though, what other yardsticks permit us to declare certain ideas off-limits? Some will argue moral disgust. These hyper-activist parents filing hundreds of book-ban requests want certain ideas removed from protected discourse because the content gives them moral heebie-jeebies. This, again, questions whose tender sensibilities need protection from the mean, terrible world. Why these White, conservative parents and not, say, me?

The very existence of accused human trafficker Andrew Tate and confessed queer-baiter Jordan Peterson offends my morality. To say nothing of Alex Jones, who had his Xitter account restored this week after a blink-and-you-missed-it poll. To me, and notably also to Elon Musk immediately after he purchased and eviscerated Xitter, silencing Jones in whatever hog-wallow he sleeps in is the obvious moral choice. That homunculus doesn’t deserve a platform.

Please don’t mistake me, the left has plenty of squishy, reactive, and morally vacuous history. We’ve done a good job of opposing everything Republicans and their allies like, even when it means abjuring our principles: Democrats demanded the Trump Administration “follow the science” regarding COVID-19, for instance, then turned deaf when Trump-aligned bureaucrats presented robust (but not ironclad) evidence that the virus escaped a lab.

Admittedly, that example is slightly tangential. But it makes my point: both sides make decisions based on moral disgust, in a society that no longer even pretends to have shared morals. That means both sides are currently arguing about what public morals our society should have. Sadly, both sides have nothing to fall back on, besides their own morals. The arguments become circular, and our society becomes dizzy.

Dracula and the Problem With Modern Morality

Claes Bang as Dracula (left) and John Heffernan as
Jonathan Harker, in Moffat and Gatiss’ Dracula

Audiences who have read Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula will notice something about Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ 2020 adaptation: the Count is on screen a lot. Count Dracula is absent from over three-quarters of Stoker’s original novel, a looming presence whose terror grows more ominous because he could be literally anywhere. By contrast, Moffat and Gatiss foreground the character, who remains present and amorally aggressive even when characters (and viewers) need their rest.

Moffat and Gatiss are the creative team behind Sherlock. Yes, *that* Sherlock, the one that kickstarted Benedict Cumberbatch’s career and revitalized TV mysteries. The show was a rollicking success until it overstayed its welcome by one season, and the meme-driven zeitgeist turned against it. Steven Moffat previously paid his dues in contemporizing Victorian literature with Jekyll, which postulated a high-tech corporation wanting to harvest Mr. Hyde for profit. These guys know their modernized Victoriana.

All three original properties withheld information from readers, information which today’s audiences already have. Pretending that, for instance, Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde aren’t manifestations of the same person, would be naïve and coy nowadays. While some Massively Online Critics still complain that Sherlock suffered because the viewpoint characters withhold information from the audience, this overlooks that all three original properties did this regularly. Victorian audiences apparently loved last-minute reveals: “The killer was here the whole time squeeeee!!!”

Dracula isn’t mysterious anymore, as he was in 1897—though admittedly, more audiences probably know Todd Browning’s version than Stoker’s. Therefore withholding Dracula from audience view makes little sense. Instead, Moffat and Gatiss reveal him early, showcasing his rapacity, his sexual appetite, and his lack of common morals. Instead of making the well-known vampire appear falsely mysterious, our creative team must instead convince us why everything we believe about the famous story is wrong.

Therein lies the problem. As Susannah Clements writes, Dracula represents a specific Victorian Christian morality. Van Helsing presents himself as a “man of science,” a much less precise term than we’d accept nowadays, whose scientific acumen hoovers up any stray evidence it encounters; yet in fighting Dracula, Van Helsing reverts to the language and doctrines of Christianity. The monster fears churches, crosses, and vicars. Fundamentally, he affirms that modernity cannot survive without ancient religious truths.

Dolly Wells as Agatha Van Helsing

Except, the longer I live with Clements’ thesis, the less airtight it becomes, because that Christian morality was window dressing. Victorian England required a strong state to maintain the appearance of public virtue. William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” had become Britain’s background noise. Sherlock Holmes shot intravenous cocaine to control his moods. At this point, it’d be disingenuous to deny that Bram Stoker was probably a closeted homosexual; his schoolfriend Oscar Wilde was jailed in 1895.

Abraham Van Helsing (rendered by Moffat and Gatiss as Agatha Van Helsing, a Carmelite nun) didn’t restore foundering Victorian Christianity; he enforced a specific kind of moral vestment on a largely secularized, industrialized nation. He encouraged the cadre of men driving the story to punish Lucy Westenra, who had, in coded language, been sexually liberated enough to choose her own lovers. As punishment, the men took turns, ahem, driving their wooden stake into her.

Agatha Van Helsing, opposite her literary ancestor, has no patience for public morality. Though a nun, she’s substantially secularized; she describes her holy orders as “a loveless marriage.” Her Dracula reacts with the same vehemence as Stoker’s to crosses and other religious appurtenances, but Agatha rejects the religious explanation. She accuses Dracula of retroactively constructing a moral explanation for his abilities and weaknesses—then she does the same. For her, morality is as morality does.

The lack of underlying morality—even one the characters only observe for ceremonial purposes—is the defining difference between this Dracula and Stoker’s. Unfortunately, without such an underlying morality, the story has nothing to be about. Van Helsing speculates aimlessly about why medieval European morality still has power over Dracula, and reaches a resolution that satisfies her only in the closing minutes. For us peons watching, however, the explanation raises more questions than it answers.

Nobody could rewrite Dracula for modern audiences and retain Victorian morality. In Britain, Christianity has retreated to the second most common religious identity, after “none”; and even in America, which (unlike Europe) emerged from two world wars more religious rather than less, Christianity has fallen below two-thirds of the population. Our vampires today are Lestat and Edward Cullen, not Dracula. Yet as with Van Helsing’s religion, the premodern story keeps intruding on our modern world.

The Courage to Change a Broken World, Part 2

Hispaniola, in a map from the Encyclopedia Britannica

I first recall Haiti with clarity following the 1991 coup d’etat against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country’s first democratically elected president. I have vague, muddled prior recollections of Haiti in the news, particularly surrounding “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s expulsion; but I was too young to understand events in context. I was only eleven when Baby Doc fell, and remember wondering how bad somebody with such a cutesy-poo nickname could really be.

Finally old enough to understand the country’s historical context in 1991, I read Haitian history and culture avidly—to the extent I could. My local public library had exactly one book on Haiti, Wade Davis’ The Serpent and the Rainbow. (I’d watch Wes Craven’s feature film adaptation years later; the movie reduces Davis’ immersive anthropology to lurid exoticism.) I later discovered Paul Farmer when I started college. Sources were scarce.

With no scope to understand Haiti’s internal forces, I struggled to encompass much about Haiti. Despite being the Western Hemisphere’s second-oldest nation, it hadn’t enjoyed the United States’ economic prosperity or internal stability. Though the nation was functionally independent by 1804, it couldn’t organize a nationwide election until 1990. Both countries had fertile soil, luxurious coastlines, abundant natural resources, and robust populations. But only one got rich.

Wade Davis

Back then, I was more conservative, and believe me, I could’ve easily explained Haitian poverty dismissively. America’s founding (White) leaders were moneyed, aristocratic, and essentially bastions of old-world privilege. Haiti’s founders, former slaves all, were substantially illiterate and uniformly Black. Though it would’ve been impolitic to say so aloud in 1991, one underlying thread of American political discourse happily blamed the Caribbean Blacks for their own plight.

I couldn’t stomach such racism, then or now, despite Republican leanings. Accepting an entire nation’s inherent moral deficiency felt slovenly, until I’d exhausted other likely explanations. I quickly learned that French colonial masters made themselves obscenely wealthy through slave plantations and coerced labor. Revolutionary leaders chased France out in an overthrow that descended into a pogrom… and then, having no other model, cracked down on the citizenry.

America’s revolutionary leaders claimed to commence a new nation, a new democratic experiment, then simply repeated English social structure. Aristocracy, peonage, and slavery were the hallmarks of Early America, and in some places, still are. Haitians likewise repeated the colonial administration, because it’s what they knew. This meant bloody reprisals for minor acts of willfulness and independence: public maiming, a legacy of French slavery, is still a Haitian political tool.

This became an important seed in my political awakening. Poverty, I realized, appears causeless and simply natural, because the social forces which cause it are so baked into our environment that we can’t see them anymore. The bloody reprisals enacted by the Tonton Macoute or by Raoul Cédras’ army always first hit those Haitians who showed leadership, entrepreneurship, or self-reliance. Haiti’s ruling elite paid handsomely to keep the poor impoverished.

Dr. Paul Farmer

It took years before I applied this heuristic to American politics. Eventually I realized that some of America’s most lush, resource-rich states were the most economically impoverished, for exactly this reason. Chronically poor states, such as those in the Old Confederacy, have a long history of squandering their fertile lands, clear waters, and strong people, to keep ensure that Blacks, Native Americans, immigrants, and other “outsiders” don’t get any advantage.

We don’t call it that anymore, certainly, Since the middle 1960s, politicians can’t simply admit they’re engaged in Bull Connor-style naked racism designed to keep the designated underclass from rising. Yet that’s what happens with “law-n-order” crackdowns, or complaining about “handouts,” or making sure nobody receives a reward they didn’t “earn.” Entire American regions will squander abundant natural wealth to ensure the poor remain poor.

Read that way, Haiti’s struggles become instantly comprehensible. Sure, America had certain early advantages, particularly an existing moneyed class, and diplomatic recognition from the European powers, that Haiti lacked. (France didn’t recognize Haitian independence until 1826, the U.S. until 1861.) But both countries shared one important characteristic: the wealth of the nation wasn’t distributed equally, and autocrats paid heavily to ensure that inequality would survive.

The poorest citizens always paid the highest price, but their allies came a close second. Paul Farmer avoided political activities, simply providing peasants with medical care; yet treating the needy was so abhorrent that the Cédras junta expelled him for three years. The ruling elites would rather let their own citizens die than see them overcome their poverty. Viewed that way, I seriously doubt America has one penny over Haiti.

The Courage to Change a Broken World

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 115
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

Paul Farmer, Harvard-trained MD, had Haitian friends in his youth, so traveling to Haiti seemed the natural choice. When he arrived, he discovered a kind and magnitude of poverty that he couldn’t believe still existed within the United States’ sphere of influence. Moved by the plight of the suffering, he made Haiti his life’s work, teaching and treating patients part of the year at Harvard, so he could dedicate most of the year to Haiti.

Journalist Tracy Kidder discovered Farmer’s medical mission while reporting on the American invasion of Haiti in 1994, an invasion undertaken for supposedly benevolent purposes, to restore Haiti’s elected government. Kidder encountered Farmer because Farmer didn’t hesitate to name the discrepancies between the American mission, and what Americans actually did. Farmer’s confrontational style forced American diplomats to examine their choices. It also forced Kidder to question his own motivations as a journalist.

The Paul Farmer whom Kidder describes grew up relatively poor and rootless in the American Southeast. Trailer park denizens were “his people.” But he was also a hard worker, a speedy student, and an amiable, gregarious personality. He made friends and connections with an ease that might make others jealous. He maintained friendships with wealthy patrons and university peers, but also learned to speak Haitian Kreyol fluently, and won trust among the country’s chronically exploited peasantry.

This isn’t so much a biography, as a Boswell-like immersion in the subject’s life. Kidder follows Farmer to his free clinic in Haiti’s Central Plateau, among the poorest places in the Western Hemisphere. Farmer and Kidder walk along unpaved switchback roads through steep valleys, delivering medications to agrarian peasants who consider Farmer a literal wizard. Despite being younger than Farmer, Kidder often struggles to maintain Farmer’s breakneck pace and athleticism.

Although Haiti was the Western Hemisphere’s second nation to overthrow European colonialism, it never achieved the prosperity or stability of its older cousin, the United States. American slaveholders couldn’t abide a nearby neighbor populated by rebellious slaves, and never recognized Haiti until after its Civil War. Throughout the Twentieth Century, Haiti served as the proxy battlefield between America and France for hegemony over the nominally democratic world, a battle that propped up anti-democratic strongmen like the Duvaliers.

Dr. Paul Farmer

Farmer, moved by the peasants’ plight and the social mores of his Roman Catholic upbringing, saw bringing medicine to Haiti as his personal mission. But by “personal,” he didn’t mean “individual.” Kidder herein profiles several prominent allies, including Ophelia Dahl (daughter of Roald) and Jim Kim who participated in his mission. Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health, managed to parley several bouts of good luck into a longstanding project. These elements included wealthy benefactors, and Farmer’s own medical celebrity.

Two widespread diseases in Haiti, which dominated Farmer’s early career, were drug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS. Though neither disease originated in Haiti, mean-spirited Northern PR spun those diseases together with Haitian identity in the world’s imagination. This meant that Partners in Health, backed with a comfortable but not large endowment, became a global leader in TB and AIDS treatment. Farmer’s mission suddenly went from regional and personal, to global. Farmer got dragged along with it.

Kidder was present to watch much of this sudden growth. He set out to write about Farmer’s work in Haiti, but during the writing, he accompanies Farmer on trips to Peru, France, Russia, and elsewhere. Kidder chronicles Farmer’s transition from a simple Haitian country doctor—something Kidder quotes Farmer saying he only wanted to be—to a transnational medical diplomat, visiting medical conferences in Europe and North America, and treating TB patients in Latin American slums and Russian prisons.

Throughout, Farmer is driven by his personal Christianity. Though Farmer eschews doctrine, and shows impatience with formal theology, he heeds the Gospel’s message of feeding and comforting “the least of these.” Kidder repeatedly Farmer citing a “preferential option for the poor,” a term from Liberation theologian Gustavo Guitierrez. Among Farmer’s allies is a former Salesian priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Farmer embodies the self-effacing service described in the Gospels, and too often ignored by many First-World Christians.

This book shipped in 2004, as Farmer’s celebrity reached new heights, and describes a man with benevolent goals still before him. Three years later, Farmer died unexpectedly, on an outreach visit to Rwanda, his desire to retire to his inland clinic unfulfilled. This biography testifies to the good which First-World citizens can achieve, if we channel our privilege toward those in need. When we use our advantages to serve others, the world changes around us.

Jane Somewheyre

Sharon Lynn Fisher, Salt & Broom

A grim and gruesome spectre haunts the corridors of Northern England’s isolated Thornfield Hall. Edward Rochester, lord of the manor, doesn’t believe in ghosts, but his people do. So he requests the Lowood School, famous for training witches and other spellcasters, send someone to exorcise his home. With some reluctance, the school sends Jane Aire [sic], who is an expert herbologist but has little experience with the outside world.

Veteran classic literature readers will recognize the broad outline of events described. Sharon Lynn Fisher has published several volumes combining science fiction or fantasy with romance; for this volume, she’s chosen to put a fantastic spin on one of the foundational texts from which romance writers frequently draw. Charlote Brontë’s Jane Eyre has captivated audiences for 175 years with its combination of weight and whimsy, and its deep dive into the human psyche.

Fisher’s adaptation omits the portions of Jane’s “autobiography” centered on the Reed and Rivers families, and reduces Lowood School to background. She cares more about Jane’s interactions with Rochester, with the assorted denizens of Thornfield Hall, and with the first Mrs. Rochester—whose story here is aggressively altered. The emphasis lies heaviest on the romance aspects, as the fantastic components are very loosely draw.

Thornfield Hall is the epitome of Gothic intricacy: miles of sprawling corridors and countless disused rooms. Jane finds a household staff plagued by phantoms they can’t easily explain, but which they also haven’t really seen. Unlike in Brontë’s original novel, everyone here is completely forthcoming about the first Mrs. Rochester, and her tragic end. They’re more circumspect about what came before her demise, or why they can’t release her memory.

Rochester himself resembles the original, a private man, cautious in displaying his feelings. His staff of hundreds depend on his wealth, and high-class bachelorettes pursue him, but he has no real friends. Jane struggles to understand: is he still mourning his wife? Did he ever truly love her? Is he even capable of love? Because the longer Jane interacts with Rochester, the more she experiences feeling she’s never known before.

Sharon Lynn Fisher

Before continuing, let me acknowledge: I’m not this book’s target audience. Fisher writes for audiences who consume classic semi-romance literature, like the Brontë sisters or Jane Austen, as casually as paperback novels. Her low-friction storytelling elides the coded language common in 19^th Century literature, and the almost Monty Python-esque humor beneath the sometimes starchy surface. This book feels like Charlotte Brontë retold as beach reading.

Jane practices a lite-beer form of Wicca, one broadly compatible with staid post-Georgian British Christianity (the story includes references to religion, but only in passing). Her witchcraft consists mostly of making talismans, in the broadest sense, and speaking rhymes. Though the magical system matters greatly to Jane, and drives parts of the story, Fisher doesn’t much explicate it. One suspects she cares little for mechanical details.

The romance feels similarly hasty. Jane says she’s approaching thirty, and has spent nearly her entire life at Lowood School. She’s had few interactions with men who aren’t either stern patrician figures or earthy tradesmen. Her sojourn at Thornfield, an unspecified span of months in Brontë’s telling, is herein reduced to days. Yet she feels so passionately for Rochester that she disobeys instructions, exceeds her training, and trusts Rochester completely.

Fisher implies a complex, heady, multisensory world behind her story. Jane, our narrator, expounds on the complexity of Thornfield’s grounds, its multiple gardens for food and herbology, its charming Gothic ruins. She implies the existence of bacchanalian Bonfire Night celebrations, and a world of passions kept secret under decorous Regency-era public morality. Yet all this never quite goes anywhere. Jane introduces evocative themes, but carries few of them forward.

Please don’t misunderstand: this isn’t a bad book. Fisher retells Brontë’s story without the stiff outdated language, the lengthy digressions, or the sometimes moralistic tone. Her addition of witchcraft makes explicit several themes beneath the surface of Brontë’s original. And not everyone shares my belief that characters should face difficulties in achieving their intended ends. Again, this book isn’t bad; it just wasn’t written for me.

Perhaps I set my expectations too high. In combining classic literature with fantasy, I expected Fisher to create something closer to the Lord of the Rings, something dense with adventure and the complexity of human experience. Fisher instead offers something classic literature fans can snuggle under, comforted by the familiarity, and read without having to parse the historical context. It isn’t for me, but some people like that.