I haven't read The Scorch Trials yet (though I plan to) so I can't really comment on the decision to take it off of Deseret Book's shelves. I absolutely agree that Deseret Book has every right to remove any book it deems a bad fit to its overall brand. What I want to talk about, instead, is this target market that Deseret Book is trying so desperately to please. (So, yes: instead of criticizing a single business, I'm going to criticize a large group of people. Sorry.)
When I was president of the Whitney Awards, I'd often get emails from people--sometimes even a judge or two--asking why the Whitney Awards (an awards program for novels by LDS authors) didn't have rules that excluded books based on content that didn't live up to LDS standards. My answer was always the same: there is no moral yardstick that could possibly be applied to all books that would determine whether or not they live up to LDS standards. Some people will adamantly insist that the slightest swear word is inappropriate. Others will claim that any amount of violence is inappropriate. (Generally, these people will couch everything in the term "gratuitous": no gratuitous violence, no gratuitous sensuality. "Gratuitous" is in the eye of the beholder, and about as ambiguous a measuring stick as anything I can think of.) Consequently, the books nominated for the Whitney Awards never had to pass through any kind of Appropriateness Filter. The judges had to individually answer the question: "Which book is most deserving of the Whitney Award?" and if a judge thought LDS standards were in question, they had a right to personally vote their conscience. But there was no censorship board, no content review panel. Why? Because it simply wouldn't work. You would never be able to please every person's individual belief about what is "appropriate."
CASE IN FREAKING POINT (and the reason I'm writing about this today):
Publishers Weekly is reporting that a publisher, NewSouth Books, is re-releasing Huckleberry Finn sans the infamous 'n' word. Also missing is the word "injun".
Says the publisher: "...there was a market for a book in which the n-word was switched out for something less hurtful, less controversial. We recognized that some people would say that this was censorship of a kind, but our feeling is that there are plenty of other books out there—all of them, in fact—that faithfully replicate the text, and that this was simply an option for those who were increasingly uncomfortable, as he put it, insisting students read a text which was so incredibly hurtful."
This horrifies me. Both as a lover of literature and a student of history, this kind of attitude toward Huckleberry Finn--one of the most powerful indictments of slavery in world history--is offensive. They want a "less controversial" book about slavery? It is a whitewashing of our past; it is changing a painful, "incredibly hurtful" truth into a more comfortable lie.
While I don't mean to put The Scorch Trials on the same level as Huckleberry Finn (sorry, James), I think the exact same kind of attitude is present in both these audiences: that X is bad, therefore I must hide from it (and hide it from others).
If the people who complained about the Whitney Awards had their way--applying their standards of appropriateness with broad black-and-white strokes--then we would wipe out so much of what is good and important in literature. When we say "I won't read anything that has a swear word in it", then how many of the classics of literature would be left? The same can be said of any "appropriateness" measuring stick.
I'm not saying that we should consume all media--all books, movies, music and magazines--and that we should give them all to our kids. What I am saying is this:
- There is no moral standard (in LDS theology, anyway) that suggests we are to hide from the world.
- There is a moral standard that says that we should seek after "anything virtuous, lovely, of good report or praiseworthy". I think that non-edited Huckleberry Finn (and a lot of other great literature) fits into that category.
- My former stake president used to have a quote hanging in his office: "When we deal with generalities, we will never succeed. When we deal with specifics, we will rarely have a failure. --Thomas S. Monson". It's fine to make value judgments about what media we consume, but judging that media from afar with universal, flawed measuring sticks is bound to produce some pretty stupid results.
