A glass of water vs a flood

As a former librarian (I came to Newberry to serve as director of the Newberry College Library), I’m opposed to censorship. It’s a very slippery slope, and the most innocent books have been banned in the name of “protecting the people, especially the impressionable children.” But as a nation and as a global civilization, we’re now faced with a torrent of disinformation, misinformation, and outright lies. It comes from various places and through many channels, and it’s endangered democracy and peace around the world. There’s little doubt that the atrocity that occurred in Washington on January 6 was the result in large part of the campaign of disinformation that’s been waged for years now by self-serving interests both here and abroad.

What are we to do about what has become an existential threat to our society? The First Amendment enshrines our commitment to “the marketplace of ideas,” in which information is freely shared in the hope that it’s evaluated by knowledgeable people and either accepted or rejected. But there are people who hide behind the First Amendment while spewing baseless conspiracy theories and false reports that seem tailor-made to incite anger and violence – violence like what happened on January 6. How do we deal with it without endangering our commitment to the principles of the First Amendment? I’m not offering a solution. I don’t have a good solution that doesn’t violate my own opposition to censorship, except for continued and increasing emphasis on creating a well-educated populace capable of critical thought. I remain committed to the free flow of information, opinion, and the First Amendment. But what I must do is remind people of the threat and pass along what I believe is a relevant insight and warning.

British historian Arnold Toynbee studied the rise and fall of various civilizations and looked for patterns among them. Herewith, the “Challenge and Response” section from the Wikipedia article on Toynbee:

“With the civilisations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response, sometimes referred to as theory about the law of challenge and response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when “creative minorities” devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organising the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. When a civilisation responded to challenges, it grew. Civilizations disintegrate when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilisations then sank owing to nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. According to an Editor’s Note in an edition of Toynbee’s “A Study of History,” Toynbee believed that societies always die from suicide or murder rather than from natural causes, and nearly always from suicide. He sees the growth and decline of civilisations as a spiritual process, writing that “Man achieves civilization, not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment, but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee).

The World Wide Web and the internet were supposed to create an environment that would truly become the free and open “marketplace of ideas.” But while some of its promise has been kept, it has also in part morphed into a Frankenstein’s monster that threatens to strangle us with our own principles.

The United States prides itself on its ability to produce creative solutions to challenges. It would be a tragedy to see our civilization die by its own hand because we were unwilling and/or unable to deal creatively with this existential threat.