On Formal and False Equivalence
In the controversy surrounding the decision by Dr Seuss’ heirs to stop publishing six titles due to racist imagery, I was first struck by how different the cultural response was compared to, say, debates around “Tintin in the Congo”. There have been many debates and controversies around the Tintin book, but my memory of when this reached Winnipeg was that there was never a connection to a larger cultural and social threat, as there is today. The decision to stop publishing “And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street!” (a favourite of mine when I was a kid) is connected now to the (fraudulent) “culture war” and is in and of itself some kind of threat to “Western civilization” and “liberal values”. This difference in emphasis ought to provoke us to ask what is socially and culturally different about the two events, but I don’t see that happening very much.
There are many ways we could look at the Dr Seuss decision from a critical intellectual freedom perspective. We could point out that ceasing to publish new copies doesn’t remove the millions of old copies from the cultural world. We could point to library selection policies and the new (and still, unfortunately, contested) sensitivity towards contextual richness in description, classification, and display. We could talk about the roles different libraries play, their different user-bases, and the different activities - and corresponding epistemological orientations - that take place in them. Having “On Beyond Zebra!” - properly described and classified - in an academic library may make sense where having it in the children’s collection of a public library may not. However, IF absolutists don’t like the idea of contextual description, seeing any “extra-textual” information as biasing the self-motivating freedom of the rational individual to choose for themselves (it sounds so absurd when you say it out loud).
But another point struck me that I want to dig into here. I’ve written before and elsewhere about liberal proceduralism, the need for liberal thought to reduce everything to well-understood, repeatable procedures in order to reduce risk and increase the automated administration of social life. Algorithmic governance is simply one extreme form of liberal proceduralism. But liberal proceduralism also intersects with the “naturalism” of social scientific thinking.
Naturalism in social science is the view that human and social behaviour can be studied and known using the same methods, tools, and concepts as natural science. The tendency towards naturalism in social science developed on the back of natural science’s success at predicting and then dominating the natural world. (The most explicit form of this domination is probably industrial capitalism itself). By the end of the 19th century, most if not all social sciences - beginning with economics - wanted to reorient themselves to take advantage both of natural science’s proven methods as well as its cultural capital.
There are many problems with a naturalistic view of social science. One of the main ones is the question of causality. Because human beings - both individually and in groups - have agency (in whatever sense we might mean that), the same context or antecedent events do not always have the same consequences; they do not show the same kind of causal regularity that, say, heating water to 100°C does at Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea-level. In fact, I would argue that liberal proceduralism is an attempt to introduce a kind of naturalist causal regularity into human affairs: only a fully-predictable social order can be administered with zero risk of disruption.
One way in which this kind of causal proceduralism comes into effect is in the emphasis of formal regularity over content (meaning). Colloquially, this is what happens in “both sides” discourse, where the outward form of, say, violent racist fascists and antifa, allow the centre and the right to say that they are, in fact, the same thing.
We can see this kind of formal equivalence on display in statement by the Collections and Program Development Director of Hamilton Public Library’s statement on the idea of removing the Dr Seuss books from the library collection. Lisa Radha Weaver states that while the books will not be put on any reading lists or prominently displayed, they will remain in the collection. What is significant, however, is her use of the kind of formal equivalence I’ve been talking about to add historical weight to her position:
She pointed out that libraries have long included controversial content, which in the 60s, 70s and 80s, meant the inclusion of LGBTQ materials.
Now, as a communist I’m not insensitive to this argument to a certain extent. Communist material was some of the most suppressed material in North America throughout the Cold War, and it’s probably not too much to say that my chance discovery of The Communist Manifesto in my University bookstore changed my life. However, the false equivalence here is based on the formal equivalence between things that “are controversial” irrespective of the reasons they are controversial. An act of excluding materials from a collection is always “the same” if we forget about our reasons for doing so. With this kind of formal equivalence, there is no difference between removing a book from a library collection because it is racist and removing it because it promotes equity and inclusion.
In their excellent recent book detailing an anti-naturalist approach to social science (recommended by my colleague Sarah Polkinghorne), Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely describe this preference for formal equality.
Naturalists have attempted to revolutionize the social sciences by making them look more like the natural sciences in countless ways; these include: searching for ahistorical causal laws; eliminating values and political engagement from the study of human behaviour; removing or demoting the role of meanings and purposes in favour of synchronic formalism and quantification; and treating social reality as reducible to brute, verifiable facts in need of minimal interpretation.
Bevir and Blakely argue that naturalists reject the thick, complex web of meanings inherent in historical explanation in favour of “ahistorical and formal modes of explanation and analysis”. One of the reasons for this rejection is that the complicated (messy) reality of historical explanation does not lend itself to the proceduralist reduction necessary for the capitalist administration of human life. When a library administrator makes the argument that the formal equivalence of removing books from a collection is all that matters and that the reasons for doing so are irrelevant, they lay claim to a certain set of commitments that I’m not sure they are fully aware of.
They undermine selection policies and collection development itself. If all acts of exclusion from a collection are formally equivalent, no act of selection or weeding can be justified for any reason. (Library practice, I should point out, violates this at every turn: selection and weeding policies and procedures are vital to a library’s collection). I should also point out that positioning weeding as always solely on the basis of formal considerations does us no favours either, but I don’t think that happens very often. We should be (and often we are) open and upfront about weeding based on (outdated/dangerous) content.
They - as always - omit the fact that our selection is externally constrained, not only by matters of relative innocence, such as considerations of space, availability, etc, but by corporate publishing machines and the identification of “what users want” with “what is massively popular”. I’m looking at you, 150 copies of The Half-Blood Prince. (Fredric Jameson has written about this in relation to literary studies, where for a long time literary scholars could not countenance the idea of external determinants of literary form, increasing paper costs spelling the end of the three-volume 19th century novel, for example).
They undermine the agency, positionality, and values of library workers. If we can reduce library decision-making to formal equivalence and (automatable) procedure, then there is no room for contextual, nuanced, socially and politically aware, committed praxis on the part of library workers at all.
These are just some of the consequences that an attempt at value-free neutrality - in the guise of formal equivalence - has for library work. Indeed, liberal proceduralism relies on the evacuation of questions of value from social, cultural, and political questions; neutrality is simply the “good face” placed on this denial or erasure. In terms suggestive of the problems in LIS as a social science, Bevir and Blakely write that
Can students and scholars who wish to explain human behaviour also engage in ideological and ethical critique? When and how do values enter into social scientific research? One of naturalism’s most serious limitations results from its disavowal of ethical engagement, ideology, political theory, and the critical analysis of values. Inspired by the natural sciences, naturalist philosophy encourages social scientists to believe they have no intrinsic contribution to make in debates over values and ideology. instead their research must remain value-free, an instrumental repository of facts, and never engage in ethical, ideological, or political criticism.
I’ll conclude this blog post with one more observation about the tendency to proceduralism. In today’s discursive struggles over “cancel culture”, etc, whenever a critic suggests a course of action: (the exclusion of six racist titles from a library collection, for example) it is automatically assumed that, in true naturalist fashion, they are proposing an eternal, value-free procedure to govern behaviour from then on. It is as if they are proposing a rule. And while I think a rule excluding racists books would be justified, that’s not the point I want to make. The point is that the opposite of a “neutral” (mindless) proceduralism is an engaged commitment to evaluation. But the dominance of naturalist, procedural thinking in liberal society means that everything must be proposed and understood in terms of new rules. In reality, rules are most often insufficient for social, cultural, and political questions: every case really needs to considered as if it were almost unique; every case must be interpreted in its full social and historical significance. Proceduralism is a way to avoid thinking, to outsource human thought and response to a transcendent, “objective” rule. When critics suggest removing racist books from a collection, we must avoid the naturalist temptation to make yet another “value-free” rule of it.
We have to face up to questions of meaning: why were those books produced? why were they collected? what has changed in our social and cultural context since they were published/collected? Not in order to justify keeping them in the collection, but so that we can fully understand what we are doing in order to do better from now on. Any form of “intellectual freedom” adequate to its social conjuncture must emphasize this kind of evaluation as a form of agency.
Lisa Radha Weaver tries to offload that kind of evaluation onto parents. I think this is a red herring. Not only does excluding some titles from a public library not make those titles unavailable (thus securing for parents their own continued evaluative agency), but the outsourcing of evaluation undercuts the very professional responsibility and praxis of library workers themselves. If our work does not entail real, in-depth evaluation, if it can be reduced to easily-automatable value-free procedure, then we won’t have library workers very much longer (as we can already see in places like the U.K.).
UPDATE: This blog post originally described Lisa Radha Weaver as CEO of Hamilton Public. The post has been updated with her correct title.