Turning Public Libraries into Public Latrines
Nothing reveals America's descent into cultural mediocrity — and heading even lower — more than the availability of pornography at our nation's public libraries. I say we are heading deeper into depravity on the basis of the defense of the New York Public Library's policy of letting adult patrons use its computers for pictorial voyeurism, telling any other library patrons disturbed by noticing what is going on that they should move to a computer at a greater distance.
Though the library must have filtering software on its computers or lose federal financing, it will disable the filter at the request of any user older than 17. When a cultural facility such as a library feels compelled to cater to those of pornographic appetites, then it takes on the role of a procurer and provider — that is, the library becomes, in a blunter term — a pimp.
The New York Times Magazine's ethicist, Randy Cohen, finds this just peachy keen. In a column syndicated by Universal Press, Cohen defines for libraries what they should be about: "Libraries should provide for the free exchange of ideas — not just ideas you or I find palatable, nor just ideas suitable for five year olds." This is in answer to a reader who wants something done to protect children at the library from the scatology that inhabits today's computers, entered therein by filth dealers who use it as a lure, just as a fisherman uses a worm on a hook.
Cohen should be asked to explain just how the scatological has anything to do with ideas that should be freely "exchanged." Pornography doesn't deal in ideas. Ideas are creations of the intellect. They are the essence of thought, and advance understanding of that which distinguishes human persons from brute animals. Pornography is not only apart from and unlike that intellectual function; it is contrary and hostile to it.
Pornography feeds the sexual appetite that humans share with animals, but which their will can control and apply for its purpose of expressing human love. Many experts in behavior will tell you pornography is contrary to that purpose. Married persons unfortunate enough to have a voyeuristic spouse will affirm the same thing. Addiction to licentiousness in picture and word undermines the application of human sexual power in the service of love.
Ethicist Cohen making it a matter of mere taste or of ideas suitable for mature humans though not children shows a total lack of understanding of what is involved. Having libraries ready to help summon up scatology for its patrons to savor and for their titillation serves absolutely no social or civic purpose. On the contrary, it makes of the library a wallowing place for indulging appetites in which others, but almost always women — are reduced to objects of engorgement and excretion.
Libraries were once considered hallowed places of uplift and access to heights of human expression. Pornography makes them nothing better than public latrines. Cohen, rather, finds its availability to be consistent with "the library's ethos and responsiveness to the sensitivities of patrons of all ages." Since when has pornography appealed to any human's "sensitivities," rather to his (and rarely her) carnal and voluptuous concupiscenses? Pornography once was found in brothels for its aphrodisiacal effects. One thing pornography, by its very definition and purpose, does not do is serve anyone's "sensitivities." Even granted the erotic might have a role in art and genuine literature, it would be wrong to equate such quality with the assault on sensitivities that licentiousness and the scatological deliver.
Why should a library have to cater to the appetite for what is sexually depraved (another definition for pornography) anymore than an art museum or statuary hall would have to provide pornography at some visitor's demand? There is no legal, ethical, or artistic tradition granting recognition or protection to pornography. We have moved to lessen restrictions on all private expressions, be they worthy or unworthy, creative or destructive. But here we are not dealing with the private, but the public, domain. If taxpayers are going to have to support public places for exercise of anyone's appetite for pornography, doesn't it logically follow there be publicly supported bawdy houses? Further, will we not have to allow nudists the right to use public streets to display themselves, telling parents their children can use other paths in order not to have to view them.
All of this is nonsense, and it is from the liberal side of a society that finds sex — whether used in society's interest or that of personal depravity — something "good" and desirable and enriching. But literature ceases being literature when it becomes pornography, and art ceases being beautiful when it does so. Some will grant the nobility of being literature or art to what is pornographic, but that doesn't make it such. Our age has surrendered critical veracity when it fails to distinguish the ugliness inherent in pornography because of its abuse of the true and beautiful regarding human sex, from those qualities present in any honest and non-prurient treatment of human faculties.
America rushed into a public enterprise of education of its children in the facts about sex. What was neglected was an education about how necessary for a nation's health is an understanding or wisdom as to the meaning and purpose of sex. Religion once could be relied upon to do that needed education. But with the increasing distance between any cultural attention to how licentious sex can corrupt society and the coming to age of recent generations, sexual knowledge has been totally mechanical. The role of families as needed units of American society is barely touched upon in today's public education.
More and more, sex has become simply a casual encounter, almost a rite of passage from immaturity to adulthood. And in this condition follows unhappiness, fewer and fewer stable families based on any seriousness about "until death do us part." In that culture, pornography is of no significance whatsoever. When sex and its use is totally recreational, then obviously pornography becomes just another of its "experiences." This can be as deadly to happiness as is making use of drugs or alcohol a replacement for family closeness.
It would not be a wild prediction to say that if pornography is recognized as a proper function of public libraries, the providing of it will become a greater and greater role. The next step might be places to watch pornography, and then put into play the perversions and atrocities viewed. If pornography is so valuable as to have a place for library viewing, then what it depicts would be even more valuable if acted out.
This wouldn't be the first time places and facilities of great nobility, and sacredness, were converted into places of death and debacle. You are very likely to meet the Devil somewhere along the way climbing to high places where God dwells. The Devil will convince you not to climb any further, you have met someone even better than God.
Pornographic "artists" and "dealers" will work at providing that which will satisfy without having to deal with genuine and meaningful ideas that literature offers. Don't expect to see the voyeurs at New York's Public Library turn from the filth made available to them on computers, and go to the shelves to borrow some of the great works of the masters. Once lust is catered to, offerings of truth and beauty won't offer much competition.
What the New York Public Library is really doing is desensitizing with pornography any dedication to the truly great works that libraries were created for so that the least among us could drink of their deep wells of human understanding and significance. Where might ethicist Cohen find any purpose for an exchange between such great things and the so-called ideas he thinks are offered in pornography?
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This item 6389 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
