Author: Ophelia Benson

Andrew Brown is also eloquent on the subject.

The whole point about the net is that, like books, it gives people a shared space and a shared experience that is not physical. If I sit in an internet cafe – or even, God forbid, an office – and talk to someone on the net, I am far closer to the person to whom I am talking than to the noble workers on each side of me, who would never dream of emailing gossip in the middle of a working day. When I read a book, I am communing with the author, and perhaps with all the
other readers, not with anyone else in the railway carriage.

This is one of the exciting things about books (and the net), and turning libraries into youth clubs is one way to make that fact harder to discover.

Learning outside school is an essentially solitary process, too. It requires concentration; it may not require silence all the time – I often find it helpful to read or work in a cafe – but when studying needs outside stimulus, you take the book away from the library, a service they already offer.

The libraries don’t need to provide the noise for you. Noise is easy to find; quiet is not, especially for people who don’t have money.

What is particularly cruel and futile about the Burnham plan is that it destroys the one thing that libraries offer which no amount of internet cafes, Starbucks or even skating can offer: the place where poor students can find the calm they need to try to teach themselves things that are genuinely hard to learn. Middle-class or richer children, or children at good schools, can always find a place to be quiet and study with concentration. But there must be lots of people for whom a library is the only free public space outside a church where you can hope for calm; and the reading matter in church pews tends to be depressingly limited.

Library students everywhere please take note. (They won’t though – they hated this article as well as the Indy one.)

Someone who works at a public library and is ‘studing an MSc in Information and Library Studies’ at a University was terribly irritated by that piece on libraries the other day.

The article is awash with dismay over the move to allow library users to eat, drink and, heaven forbid, actually talk. Interestingly, they talk about the ’silence rule’- a concept that is completely alien to either myself or just about any other person I have encountered who works in a public library.

Ah, is it indeed. Why?

Don’t bother asking; the library student never says. It’s such an absurd, outdated, stuffy, elitist, stupid idea that it’s simply self-evident what’s wrong with it. Which is interesting, because one would think (or hope, forlornly) that people who work in libraries would have at least a glimmer of an idea why people who frequent libraries would value silence while they do it. But apparently not.

If these people have their way, the public library would be nothing more than a physical manifestation of all that was bad about the 1950s. Time moves on, society changes, customers needs change. Libraries must, therefore, change.

Why? Again, the student doesn’t say. Society does change, of course, but why that means libraries now have to be raucous instead of quiet is not clear, nor is it clear why ‘customers’ need noise in place of quiet. But then of course we are not students of Information and Library Studies, so naturally we do not understand.

[O]ne thing is for certain, things need to move forward. There should not be enforced silence (we don’t and it certainly isn’t noisy, despite what the critics might assume), there should be an attempt to make the library a cool place to hang out…and, above all, the library should be open and welcoming to everyone, regardless of who they are. Elitism will kill the library service. Eradicating the old-fashioned perception of libraries might just save it.

‘It certainly isn’t noisy’ – well I wish that were the case in the public libraries I know, but it isn’t. I don’t ‘assume’ they’re noisy, I know damn well they are because I use them. I use them, but I don’t consider them ‘open and welcoming to everyone’ – I don’t consider them welcoming to people like me who want to be able to read and think in libraries. They are welcoming to people who want to make noise, they are welcoming to people who want to treat the library like an auxiliary living room or a part-time kindergarten, but they are not welcoming to people who want to use the library as a library.

Why does future librarian assume that being open and welcoming to everyone requires being noisy and raucous? Why does future librarian assume that everyone wants noise and raucousness all the time and everywhere? Why does future librarian not think it is possible to be open and welcoming to everyone by offering quiet in one place and noise in others? Coffee shops are open and welcoming to everyone but they don’t serve fish or provide Balkan dance troupes. Rock concerts are open and welcoming to everyone but they don’t provide quiet and desks and books. Why can’t libraries be open and welcoming to everyone in a library way instead of a different way? Library student doesn’t say, and neither do the three commenters, one of whom has worked in libraries for 25 years. Which is depressing for the future of libraries. Apparently what one learns when one studies ‘Library Studies’ is that libraries should be abolished while (inexplicably) retaining the old name.

I saw library student’s post via a post at Tom Morris’s place. He is eloquent on this subject.

On page 301 of C S Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion John Beversluis has a lovely passage from Mill. At the end Mill gives what I have long thought of as the Huck Finn response, but Huck seems to have derived it from Mill, so I will attribute it to Mill in future.

From Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy:

‘If in ascribing goodness to God I do not mean what I mean by goodness; if I do not mean the goodness of which I have some knowledge, but an incomprehensible attribute of an incomprehensible substance, which for aught I know may be a totally different quality from that which I love and venerate – and even must, if Mr. Mansel is to be believed, be in some important particulars opposed to this — what do I mean by calling it goodness? and what reason have I for venerating it? If I know nothing about what the attribute is, I cannot tell that it is a proper object of veneration. To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good? To assert in words what we do not think in meaning, is as suitable a definition as can be given of a moral falsehood. Besides, suppose that certain unknown attributes are ascribed to the Deity in a religion the external evidences of which are so conclusive to my mind, as effectually to convince me that it comes from God. Unless I believe God to possess the same moral attributes which I find, in however inferior a degree, in a good man, what ground of assurance have I of God’s veracity? All trust in a Revelation presupposes a conviction that God’s attributes are the same, in all but degree, with the best human attributes. If, instead of the “glad tidings” that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that “the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving” does not sanction them.; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.’

That is (surely) the only honourable position to take. We should not call any being good, who is not what we mean when we apply that epithet to our fellow humans. If we do we simply risk approving tyranny and cosmic sadism. We should not risk that.

I read a funny story in II Samuel 6 today. (I was reading about what a shit god can be. There’s this bit in II Samuel 6 where David and some friends are transporting the ark of the covenant somewhere in a cart, and Uzzah put his hand on the ark to steady it because the cart was shaking – so god killed him. That makes a lot of sense – Uzzah tries to help and god kills him for it. Nice guy. David gets cold feet then and puts the ark in storage, not wanting to get smited, then he runs some experiments and confirms that god helps people who have the ark [apart from Uzzah, but that’s not explained] and hurts those who don’t [reason not explained] so David is happy again and throws a party.) David dances in his underpants in front of the ark and Samuel’s daughter Michal sees him from a window and disdains him in her heart. And she tells him so. ‘Some king you are,’ she says. ‘You danced in your underpants in front of your servants’ girlfriends. What a schmuck.’ David says ‘God likes me better than he likes your father so ha.’ And Michal never had any children, so that (it is implied) was God’s ha.

I’m writing a review of C S Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion by John Beversluis. It’s a gripping read, at least if you’re interested in argument and belief and arguments for belief in god and the problem of evil and theistic epistemology and the difference between rhetoric and argument. Beversluis shows carefully and in detail what is wrong with Lewis’s various claims. It’s a gripping read if you’re interested in reasons for believing things, and if you’re not interested in that, you ought to be; everyone ought to be.

The most gripping chapter, in my view, is chapter 10, ‘C S Lewis’s Crisis of Faith.’ Beversluis argues (and shows, I think) that in his despair after his wife’s death Lewis (without admitting it) gave up his Platonist view of morality – that good is prior to god and good because it is good, not because god loves it – and was stuck with the Ockhamist view that the good is whatever god damn well says it is, no matter how horrible we think it is.

Beversluis points out (p. 291) that the Ockhamist view is philosophically untenable but also more compatible with the biblical God than the Platonist view is. There are a few people in the bible, like Job, who question god’s goodness from a moral point of view, but they’re ‘glaring exceptions to the standing rule that God is to be obeyed no matter what – that is, no matter how flagrantly his commands violate moral rules including the Ten Commandments.’ He cites some nasty examples (God stops Abraham from killing Isaac, but he doesn’t stop Jephthah from killing his daughter). Then he points out (p 292) that the Ockhamist god, ‘who is not good “in our sense,” is the god of ‘the vast majority of orthodox Christians, most of whom have never heard of the Platonist alternative and, when told about it, typically reject it out of hand. Orthodox Christians unhesitatingly believe that obedience to God is absolute and unconditional – that he is to be obeyed simply and solely because he is God.’

This is an interesting and deeply depressing thought.