In the following letter to the editor, I propose the query: What if Harriet Beecher Stowe had not written “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”?
Harriet’s words changed the world. Her words opened readers’ eyes to the realities of slavery and the humanity of enslaved people. As Dr. Steven Pinker points out in the book “Better Angles of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined” :
“The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing, but reading is a technology for acquiring perspective. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person’s mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions. Reading novels about characters unlike oneself exercises the ability to put oneself in other people’s shoes, which influences one against cruel punishments and other abuses of human rights.”
“In many cases a bestselling novel or memoir demonstrably exposes a wide range of readers to the suffering of a forgotten class of victims and have led to a change in policy. Around the same time that ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ mobilized abolitionist sentiment in the United States, Charles Dickens’s ‘Oliver Twist’ (1838) and ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ (1839) opened people’s eyes to the mistreatment of children in British workhouses and orphanages, while Richard Henry Dana’s ‘Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea’ (1840) and Herman Melville’s ‘White Jacket’ helped end the flogging of sailors.
“In the past century Erich Maria Remarque’s ‘All Quiet on the Western Front,’ George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ Arthur Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon,’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,’ Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night,’ Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five,’ Alex Haley’s ‘Roots,’ Anchee Min’s ‘Red Azalea,’ Azar Nafisi’s ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran,’ and Alice Walker’s ‘Possessing the Secret of Joy’ all raised public awareness of the suffering of people who might otherwise have been ignored.”
We curtail exposure to literature at our own risk. While I am empathetic to anyone raising a child and wanting to protect them, I will say that I did many stupid things as a teenager and in my 20s, but none of them were caused by a book. I will ask the readers if they recall any time where a book caused them to do something they regret?
I don’t think that’s the way it happens; your children’s friends and social media have a much greater influence than books and teachers and besides, they are much more clever than we are. I’m sure they can acquire any literature they want from the internet.
Our best protection for ourselves and our children is not by making safe places but by challenging ourselves and those we love to think for themselves. Van Jones, of CNN put it this way to a group of college students:
“I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym.”
Nicholas R. Custer
ncuster1000@gmail.com
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