Aidan MacKenzie is a Graduate Student in Greek & Roman Studies at the University of CalgaryDo you remember Professor Jordan Peterson’s 2018 book 12 Rules for Life? Of course you do; 2018 was not all that long ago. You might, then, also remember his tenth rule: “Be Precise in Your Speech.” As useful a rule as this is in one’s personal life, it is downright indispensable in politics.The government of Alberta recently issued new content standards to the schools of the province, removing any materials deemed “sexually explicit” from school libraries. The policy followed a process of public consultation, involving a survey which interested Albertans could fill out on the subject of sexual content in books and other media available in schools.Like many Albertans, I enthusiastically took the survey when it was made available and, on the face of it, I emphatically support the Alberta government’s decision to remove sexually explicit materials from schools. .Yet even as I filled out the survey, I began to have a few concerns — concerns related to the good professor’s tenth rule.You see, at first glance the matter seems clear enough: it is obviously inappropriate for school libraries to be enabling minors to access graphic sexual content. However, upon closer inspection, it occurred to me that the Alberta government may have left this policy vulnerable to certain disingenuous attacks by two-bit sophists.These objections were perfectly predictable: don’t the works of Shakespeare contain a good deal of sexual content? Sexual content that could possibly even be interpreted as “explicit” by some? I suppose they will have to be done away with. Likewise, the classics of English poetry cannot be considered safe: John Donne wrote plenty of sensual and erotic poems, and even his Holy Sonnets at times contain graphic language. “Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me”? Questionable at best. And don’t even get me started on the Bible! Have you read Ezekiel 23? Utterly inappropriate for minors to access; we will surely have to eject it along with the quasi-pornographic material that the policy was designed to eradicate..As I said, I found such objections perfectly predictable. And, sure enough, when the local interest social media page Urba Calgary posted about the policy change, the comment section was full of just the sort of petty sophists making just the sort of disingenuous objections that I had predicted.Suppose, for a moment, we take these objections somewhat seriously. Shakespeare, John Donne, and, of course, the Bible (to give just a few examples) all contain sexual content — sometimes even graphic and disturbing sexual content — so how are they different from the books to be prohibited?The answer lies not so much in the content itself, but rather in the vision of the moral universe articulated by the various books in question..To take the most extreme case (and thus the one most frequently invoked by opponents of the new standards,) the Bible is brutally realistic about the often sordid condition of mankind. Accordingly, it should surprise no one that the Bible contains numerous instances of sex, violence, and other behaviour that we may deem, on the surface, to be inappropriate for children. But the vision of the moral universe that the Bible communicates is one that rejects rather than endorses such behaviour (outside its appropriate setting, when one exists.)For example, in 2 Samuel 13, King David’s daughter Tamar is incestuously raped by her half-brother Amnon and King David, though angry, allows Amnon to go unpunished. A disturbing episode, to be sure. So what is the Bible’s verdict? Well, King David’s tepid response results in Absalom, Tamar’s full-brother, taking justice into his own hands and murdering Amnon. This in turn sets off a chain of events leading to Absalom’s rebellion, and King David very nearly losing his throne — and likely his life.The ignoble depths to which humanity can sink are on unambiguous display. Yet the moral verdict is laid out with equal clarity..This then, is the crux of the matter: not so much the content itself, but the vision of the moral universe in which the content is embedded. The problem with the books that are being excluded from school libraries today is not merely that they contain content that may not be suitable for all ages, but rather that they communicate a perverse vision of the moral universe — a perverse vision of The Good.The great literary, poetic, artistic, and sacred works of Western civilization may all depict sex, violence, or other potentially age-inappropriate behaviour. Yet they do so in service of a vision of reality that is oriented, ultimately, towards virtue.The books to be excluded from Albertan school libraries, by contrast, are oriented towards a conception of The Good grounded in sexual experimentation and self-indulgence. And that, more than anything else, is their chief problem.And it is precisely that which the Alberta government failed to adequately articulate.Aidan MacKenzie is a Graduate Student in Greek & Roman Studies at the University of Calgary.
