If you've spent any time here at all then you've probably figured out that I'm a complete and utter Bill Moyers freak. So that's one reason that I decided to link to this keynote he delivered to the 2011 History Makers convention. The bit that hit me hardest was this:
George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that "like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket," this kind of propaganda engenders a "protective stupidity" almost impossible for facts to penetrate.
But you, my colleagues, can't give up. If you do, there's no chance any public memory of everyday truths - the tangible, touchable, palpable realities so vital to democracy - will survive. We would be left to the mercy of the agitated amnesiacs who "make" their own reality, as one of them boasted at the time America invaded Iraq, in order to maintain their hold on the public mind and the levers of power. You will remember that in Orwell's novel "1984," Big Brother banishes history to the memory hole, where inconvenient facts simply disappear. Control of the present rests on obliteration of the past. The figure of O'Brien, who is the personification of Big Brother, says to the protagonist, Winston Smith: "We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." And they do. The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publish new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Because people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.
The thrust of Moyers' speech is that facts matter. Events matter. People, places and dates matter. Information and data matter. They can be twisted, turned, framed, or forgotten, but they still matter. They matter because they are real. They fly in the face of politics. Politics hates reality.
One reason why we're here, why we decided on librarianship as a career rather than say, accounting (other than the fact that not all of us are good with numbers) is that memory hole. Librarians hate that memory hole every bit as much as politics hates reality. Librarians are guardians of the stacks and the ideas contained within the volumes that populate those stacks. Yes, we're keeping the books and full text journals and e-Books and God knows what else warm for our patrons, but there's something else going on here.
A book exists. It contains content, therefore knowledge. Granted, that knowledge was filtered through a human being, and probably a great number of them if the book was the product of a publishing committee, as is often the case with reference books. It has value to the author, therefore a similar value to the reader is implied.
Orwell understood how the memory hole operates. It's not a small effort; in fact it takes an entire department of the Ministry of Truth to keep it active. If you want to wipe out an idea, you need to find the book/novel/article that articulated it; round up and destroy all copies in print; erase all electronic versions of it on all hard drives, e-readers, etc. everywhere; then you need a team of people who are able to track down every single reference to the contents of the source in question and wipe it out, or at least rewrite it such that it points to a reference that changes the meaning of the article.
Or, as Moyers says, you can just distract people and encourage them not to learn anything, ever. Science says that's the simpler objective, so it's the one that the real Powers That Be utilize.
Let's not help them succeed.
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