Episode 3: The Courage to Read Banned Books
Welcome to the That Took Courage Podcast where we slow clap for courage, provide commentary and offer recommendations around communication challenges.
I have been thinking alot about courage lately. Specifically, the source of it.
Why do some people rise to meet the moment, while others shrink?
I talked about Ryan Holiday last week and referenced his book, Courage is Calling. Highly recommend if you have interest in this topic. Holiday features examples of humans throughout history who made courageous decisions when the moment required them. One thing I see as important in Holiday's discussion and in any discussion on the topic is the idea that we can expect fear to rise up alongside courage and that it may be true that fear is actually an incredibly helpful guide in life - instead of seeing fear as a warning away from action - Holiday reminds us that the opposite of courage is not fear, it is apathy.
Back to sourcing courage.
If it is true that courage requires overcoming fear, then it also makes sense that we need to practice this. We need to get used to challenging our fears and to me, this looks alot like practice. As with anything we must practice, at first, we are novices. We only get better by doing the thing many thousands of times.
I wondered to myself what kind of consistent practice one might undertake to strengthen this muscle and it occurred to me that healthy rebellion might be just the thing.
Which is why, today, I am talking about the courage to read banned books.
For most of human history, if you wanted a book, you needed a scribe, a small fortune, and months of patience, since every copy was made by hand. That meant only the church, universities, or the wealthy could own one. Information wasn't just scarce, it was gatekept, on purpose, by the people who benefited from everyone else not having it. Then in the 1450s, Johannes Gutenberg builds a printing press, and everything cracks open. Suddenly a book can be mass produced instead of hand copied over a year, and literacy rates in Europe start climbing fast. When Gutenberg printed Bibles, regular people could read scripture for themselves for the first time, instead of having it interpreted for them by a priest. That's the moment a lot of ordinary people realized they were allowed to have their own thoughts about what they'd been told. It fed the Reformation, the Renaissance, and eventually the Enlightenment idea that public opinion could actually challenge people in power. A piece of technology built for printing books ends up laying groundwork for democracy itself.
Libraries have always been a little rebellious by design. Early libraries in colonial America were membership clubs, where you and your wealthy neighbors pooled money to buy books nobody else got to touch. Ben Franklin ran one. And predictably, the people shut out of those clubs, women, Black communities, working people, just started their own. If you won't let me in the room, I'll build my own room. The free, open version of the library most of us grew up with is actually pretty recent. We largely have Andrew Carnegie to thank for it. Between 1886 and 1919, he funded nearly 1,700 public libraries across the country, because he believed a free library was the best gift you could give a community. He called it the cradle of democracy. That promise wasn't kept for everyone right away, either. Many of those public libraries enforced segregation, and Black communities in the Jim Crow South built their own "Freedom Libraries" in church basements just to get access to books at all.
Which is why I still think of the library as one of the last truly free spaces we have. It's one of the only places left where you can walk in with nothing and walk out with anything, no purchase, no login, nobody deciding for you what you're allowed to see. That's an enormous, radical kind of equality. And the fight over who actually gets to walk through that door, who gets to read what, has never really stopped. It's just wearing different clothes now.
If you are interested in tiny exercises in courage, join me for the Banned Books Club. Free book guides and a downloadable journal are available on my website at www.thattookcourage.com. If you join me for this, I will be interested to know what you think of this list. There IS one book that I am going to skip, can you guess what that is? I will still advocate to my last breath that people should get to choose…just like I am choosing not to read one of these books.
Do you have an opinion on banned or controversial books?
If you have a communications related question or a scenario you want broken down, get in touch by visiting thattookcourage.com
