Editor’s note: For years, the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs has brought together diplomats, journalists and academic experts to discuss key international issues. This year’s edition — Power and Empowerment — is planned as an in-person and livestream “hybrid” event. It will be held from Tuesday through Friday. It is free, but space is limited, and sign-up is required at worldaffairsconference.org. This column was written by a conference participant.

Every time I read about a banned book I ask myself, “What don’t they want us to see?” It’s a simple question that sidesteps all the pious hand-wringing and phony outrage usually surrounding this subject. At the heart of every banned book is a perspective someone doesn’t want you to read in case you start to share it or — more troublingly still — in case you see that even if you don’t share it, it’s valid.

The most frequently banned books last year were books that grew out of questions about race and sexual identity, victims of the “divisive concepts” laws enacted in 17 states. Others were banned because they contained scenes or language deemed too “adult” for younger readers, though many of them received critical acclaim and were considered thoughtful, even profound explorations of their subject matter.

Quality may be in the mind of the beholder, but these books (novels, mostly) worked not from cheap thrills or shock value, but in a sustained consideration of the world as the writer saw it. And that is, of course, the real issue. The unspoken agenda of all book bans is “Nothing to See Here.” Their purpose is not to avoid giving offense; it is to assert a particular view of the world as the only one that matters.

The playbook is one we have seen in practice since the first modern totalitarian regimes clamped down on what children learned and didn’t learn, and the pattern is as insidious as it is familiar. In Nazi Germany, students were fed a steady diet of propaganda in accord with the regime’s nationalist, racist and militaristic agenda, a model adopted by Stalin’s Soviet Union. That’s ancient history, of course, but Vladimir Putin’s Russia is again tightening its grip on what is taught in schools, as are European countries like Hungary, packaging their ruling party’s politics into what is taught about their nations’ history and culture.

Britain’s Conservative government has banned the use of classroom material coming from groups hostile to “fundamentally British values,” which doesn’t sound too bad, until you look at the small print and see that those fundamental values include “capitalism,” something a lot of young Brits are growing increasingly unsure of right now as their economy unravels and treasured institutions like the National Health Service are stripped down and sold for parts.

In the United States, book banning tends to hinge on the hysteria generated by the so-called culture wars, such as discussion of trans rights (and gender generally), or of other bogey monsters, like the much-feared and wildly misunderstood “critical race theory.” These subjects show up in fiction because it is the job of fiction to reflect the world. Do most Black writers think differently about the police than most white writers? Sure, for reasons we see in the news daily. Do today’s gay teens have different experiences of high school than what is modeled in the novels of the mid-20th century? Of course they do.

Spend your days with Hayes

Subscribe to our free Stephinitely newsletter

Columnist Stephanie Hayes will share thoughts, feelings and funny business with you every Monday.

Loading...

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Explore all your options

Part of what novels are supposed to give us is insight into ourselves by showing who we are and who we aren’t. That means that there’s value to seeing both representatives of ourselves on the page and of seeing representations of other people. I’m a straight, white guy, and I see versions of myself in books a lot. Other folks haven’t had that privilege and it is owed to them.

Also — and speaking as both a novelist and an educator — while it may be interesting for me to read about characters who look and live and love like I do, it’s also interesting for me to read about people utterly different from me, people whose sense of self positions them very differently in the world, even if we seem to be standing in the same place. This is not just valuable, it’s essential, because central to education is critical thinking, and central to living in a society is empathy. We need to be able to scrutinize the place we live in, hold it up to the light and see it from different angles in order to understand it better. This is what schools and libraries are for, not to merely confirm what you think you know, or advance the version of the world approved by local governments.

Books are portals to other worlds. They show us what we otherwise would not, could not see. That’s their job. Our job is to read them — as many and as varied as possible — so that in expanding our sense of those worlds we expand ourselves.

Nothing to see here? Sure there is. And it’s not going away.

Andrew James Hartley is the Robinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he specializes in performance issues. He is the author of scholarly books on dramaturgy, political theater and performance history and is the New York Times bestselling author of 24 novels, including the fantasy novel “Burning Shakespeare.” He writes in a variety of genres — mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, thriller, paranormal, children’s and young adult.