The New Book-Banning Movement: Scrubbing Schools Clean of Diversity, Profanity, and Sexual Content

The New Book Banning Surge

Recently, some parents here in Stillwater, OK, have started following a national trend of trying to get books pulled from school library shelves for being inappropriate. Banning books from school libraries has seen an unprecedented rise in the last year or two, and the evidence indicates that targets for removal are disproportionately books that feature diverse characters and themes, especially books by or about LGBT+ persons and people of color, and books that wrestle with issues of race in America.

Accordingto Education Week, in the recent wave 41% of books banned from school libraries feature people of color as protagonists, 22% are books that address issues of race and racism, and 33% are books with LGBT+ themes.

If diverse books were not being explicitly targeted we wouldn’t expect these numbers, given how recently school libraries have started diversifying their collections to include these minority voices and perspectives, and hence what a small percentage of the total collection these books represent.

 

Co-Opting Parents with Concerns about Sex and Profanity

But many parents are brought into the book-banning fight not by an explicit appeal to diversity but by appeal to worries about sex, violence, and offensive language in the targeted books—with sexual content and offensive language being especially significant in getting parents energized.

So, for example, the far right group Moms for Liberty has been at the forefront of efforts to ban books from schools, and they use the strategy of extracting passages with sexual content or profanity from the books they want banned and calling these passages to the attention of parents in the hope of triggering outrage.

Among their tools for pursuing book bans is the creation of a book-rating resource for parents, called BookLooks, that rates books based on content, especially focusing on sex and profanity. Books that score a 4 or 5 on a 0-5 scale of increasingly objectionable content are then lifted up as targets for banning. (It is worth noting that violence and drug/alcohol use are part of the rating system, but what puts you into the 4 or 5 category is sexual content alone: a book with extreme and explicit depictions of brutal violence but no sexual content would be rated as a 3.)

One big problem, of course, is that only a small number of books—out of the huge number available in public school libraries—have actually been rated. Based on the disproportionate degree to which diverse books are the targets of bans, one can assume that selection of which books are read with enough care to discover the “objectionable content” appears to be guided by things that have nothing to do with sex and cussing and everything to do with limiting diversity on the school library shelves.

But even if that is true, the sex and cussing are highlighted, and many parents who are swept up in the book-banning movement are drawn into it by concerns about sexual content and profanity. When more egalitarian-minded parents and teachers and librarians point out that there are many books not targeted for removal that have just as much foul language and sex, these parents happily declare, “Remove them, too!” (This was the immediate response of one Stillwater parent in a Facebook discussion thread about the local book-banning efforts here in town.)

In other words, because a desire to limit diversity and representation in school libraries is an obviously problematic reason to deny our kids access to books, objections to sex and cussing have become a driving public justification that can drum up the support of parents who wouldn’t be keen on a call to “eliminate diversity and representation in our public school libraries!” Bigots can work behind the scenes, looking for objectionable content in the diverse books—and since parents don’t have the time or energy to read all the books in the school library, the effect is that parents concerned about limiting access to sex and cussing will call for the banning of the identified books, books with diverse themes and authors, while letting similarly sexy and cussy books remain on the shelves.

In short, parents concerned about sex and cussing are being co-opted to serve the agendas of operators behind the scenes who are motivated by different aims. But here’s the thing: even if parental worries about profanity and sex in books weren’t being co-opted for the purpose of removing diverse books from our shelves, there are still reasons to question reliance on sexual or profane content as a basis for deciding what books should be available to our children.

 

My Parents’ Policy—and its Effects

When I was growing up, my parents had the following policy with respect to my book-choices: they raised their eyebrows slightly when I came home with genre fiction. Which I did a lot, in spite of their raised eyebrows, because (my parents’ snooty preference for literary fiction notwithstanding) there are lots of great books in genre fiction.

In short, I was given carte blanche freedom to read whatever I wanted to read. Usually it was fantasy and science fiction novels (JRR Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin were favorites). I loved Kurt Vonnegut. Sometimes I read something as weighty as Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev...or Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Did I end up reading books laced with profanity? Yes. Sexual content? Yes. Explicit violence? Oh yes. Great, thought-provoking literature? Yes. Stories about people very different from myself and those I grew up with, with perspectives on life radically unlike that of my community? Yes.

My parents didn’t care what I was reading. They cared that I was reading. And what was the effect of their hands-off policy? I almost never cuss, despite the cussing I read in books growing up. My sexual life is extremely tame, even though that wasn’t always true of the characters in the books I read. As far as I can recall I have never committed an act of physical violence since childhood (I believe I punched someone once when I was three and another time in junior high), even though there was lots and lots of violence in the books I read.

If there’s one really obvious effect that my childhood reading habits had on my life, it’s this: I was very successful in college and graduate school, and today I’m a college professor who still spends a lot of time reading and writing. Less obvious, perhaps, but just as real and more important: my prolific reading, especially of fiction, has had an impact on my capacity for empathy and compassion, my ability to imagine myself into the circumstances of people quite different from myself.

Now I’m not saying we should put soft porn novels in our grade school libraries. But I am saying that a fixation on sex and cussing in our high school library collections is a misguided fixation, one that could deprive our children of things with enormous value for their lives--and as such do them harm.

 

Profanity

Let’s start with foul language. Apparently BookLooks, created by Moms for Liberty to serve their book-banning efforts, gives a count of the number of cuss words in a book, using that to help determine where to place the book on the 0-5 ratings system. But how important is the amount of profanity?

When it comes to cussing in novels, so much of the impact it will have on readers depends on the broader context. Who is doing the cussing in the book? Someone the reader admires and wants to emulate? Someone who’s a jerk? Or someone the reader feels sorry for? Is the cussing happening because the author is trying to honestly represent the character—something the teen reader will likely recognize, because they know people in real life who follow the same pattern of cussing? Or is the cussing happening gratuitously, as a way to spice up the story and make the characters seem more dangerous? All of these factors will affect how the cussing in the book affects teen readers.

And let’s be honest about two things. First, we all hear cussing in real life, because there are people who cuss. Some cuss a lot. If you want to protect your kids from cussing, maybe try pretending that the COVID quarantine is still ongoing and hope your kids believe you and stay home. You certainly don’t want them sitting in a school cafeteria. Ever. But you’ll need to control your kids’ viewing habits, too. If your kids have access to TV or internet it will take a lot of effort to shield them from foul language. Books are hardly the main thing to worry about here—and in great books, the exposure to cussing is far more likely to have an important pay-off, in terms of deepened empathy for others or a broader understanding the human condition, than will the cussing they encounter in school hallways every day.

The second thing is this: We all know really good human beings, people with big hearts, who cuss. And we know some truly nasty people who are cussing-teetotalers, with never a salty word escaping their lips. The correlation between good character and cussing is…very thin, verging on nonexistent. Sure, we want to encourage people to avoid giving needless offense. But guess what? A novel in which a good person who cusses a lot ends up giving needless offense might just teach that lesson—and would be banned under policies that only care about how frequently cuss words appear in the text.

 

Sexual Content

So what about sexual content in books?

Here’s a small confession: As a teenage boy I thought a lot about sex (the sex I never actually had). I tried to get my hands on dirty magazines (there was a kind of black market of dirty magazines among my peers—magazines pilfered from trash cans or stolen from some father’s or older brother’s stash—the 20^th Century equivalent of working around parental internet controls). But I also was lured by the promise of literary depictions of sex in books.

The promise that a book contained a sex scene was often enough to get me to read it cover to cover. But the books I had access to which promised such scenes were good books. My parents didn’t have porn or erotica on their shelves, and neither did the public or high school libraries, even if they had books with sexual content.

I ended up reading a lot of great fiction—powerful literature with important themes, works that moved and transformed me—because I was hunting for the promised sex scene.

The scenes are long forgotten (if they were there at all--I sometimes got bad tips, such as when I read Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front in junior high on the promise of a sex scene). The big themes and the true-to-life characters and their struggles to belong, to find meaning, to figure out who they were and how they fit in, to rise up against challenges and confront injustice—those things stayed with me. They made me a wiser person than I would have been. A better person.

Again, I’m not saying we should be leaving soft core erotica lying around for pre-teens to read. And I don’t mean we should deliberately use the promise of sex scenes in books to lure kids into reading. What I’m saying is that some sexual content in a novel with literary merit is not the sort of thing we should be especially worried about, because that is not the sort of thing that will damage teenagers who, even if they aren’t having sex, are already thinking about sex, already obsessing about sex, already finding ways around parental controls on internet and streaming content, etc.

In my own childhood, there was only one time I can remember stumbling into something in a book that fired up my “prurient” interests. It wasn’t in any of those significant works of literature that deal honestly with human struggles, sometimes including sexuality (the kinds of books school librarians are apt to put on high school shelves).

Instead, it was in a cheesy teen romance I filched from my older sister, a book that involved no sex at all—what today would be classified as “clean” YA (young adult), since it avoided all the forbidden things: no drugs or alcohol use, no sex, no cussing. Just lots of kissing, kissing described in a way that fired up my teen hormones. When I encountered a sex scene in a serious work of literature, the deeper themes had me so absorbed that it never occurred to me to wallow in the sex. That wallowing happened with the shallow book, the one with no big ideas or important human truths to distract me from the way the depictions of kissing made me feel.

One of the scenes I read as a young adult had a profound effect on me. I can no longer remember the book, but the scene was one in which a young woman is the victim of date rape (although I think it was written before that concept was part of our shared vocabulary). It was just explicit enough to make it clear what was happening, but the weight of the writing was on the psychological experience of the girl—her anguish, the horror she felt at what was done to her by a guy she’d been attracted to, someone she’d chosen to trust, the psychological forces that kept her from refusing more forcefully, and her perverse guilt and self-blame in the aftermath. For the first time in my life, I—a straight white teenage boy obsessed with sex—found myself imagining what it would be like to be the victim of rape. I was crying in empathy with the girl’s experience.

Would I have become a date rapist had I not read that scene? I certainly hope not. But reading that changed me, making me more vividly aware than I had been before of just how utterly crucial it was for both parties to a sexual encounter to be fully, completely consenting, with no hint of ambiguity or uncertainty. It was the kind of thing that, after you finished reading it, exploded any notion some guy might have that silence was consent, or that someone who stopped saying no and just lay there had changed their mind.

Just yesterday, I read another scene a bit like the one that impacted me as a kid (although different). I read it while researching for this essay. Where did I read it? It was an excerpt from the book The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed. It was the main excerpt that the BookLooks rating site extracted from the book as an example of objectionable content. Moms for Liberty is using this rating as a rationale for seeking to have the book banned from school library shelves. (I now know the next book on my to-read list, one I'll almost certainly be passing it on to my teenage children.) 

A world where more kids read books like this is a world where sexual assault victims will have more allies, where more social and personal forces will be marshalled against the forces that spit out rapists--a world, in short, where our children are safer and better off.

The point is this: if you care about your kids’ healthy emotional development and growth as a person but what you focus on is whether a book contains sex, you are focusing on the wrong thing. What matters the most for your child’s emotional and spiritual and personal growth is whether the book offers insight into the human condition and understanding of other people, whether it encourages empathy with struggles your kids have never faced as well as identification with struggles they know well (except they now feel less alone in the struggle, less isolated and less likely to fall into despair).

The Value of Good Books, Sexual Content or Not

Good books offer insights into the human condition and opportunities for cultivating greater understanding and empathy towards others. In short, good books increase our wisdom. Sometimes the wisdom is wisdom about sex, the sort of wisdom I want my teenage children to have. But even if the wisdom is mainly about something else, I don’t want my children to be deprived of that wisdom because of a sex scene. In good books—the kinds of books our school librarians are trained to look for and add to school collections—if there is sex it is not gratuitous and disconnected from the story. Rather, it is integral to a larger story and as such can offer insight into the significance of sex, the risks of sex, and its  place in the broader context of human life.

Lousy books, by contrast, can lead us to wallow in the very shallow waters that encourage fixation on superficial desires, including sexual ones—even if they assiduously avoid explicit sex.

Our teens are going to be thinking about sex whether or not there are books in the library that have sexual content. But if there are good books that do, that may help them think about sex more wisely.

Many teens will be having sex whether or not there are books in the library with sexual content. But if there are good books with such content—books that are honest about teen sexuality, its consequences and impact on the lives of those who choose it—they may make better sexual choices than they would have otherwise.

Atheist Purification and the Case of Ryan Bell

I’ve been following with some interest the year-long journey of former Seventh-Day Adventist preacher Ryan Bell, who made the decision a little over a year ago--in the midst of a crisis of faith--to try on atheism for a year. His Year Without God has generated some strong reactions and is nicely chronicled not only in various media pieces but on his own blog.

Bell, at the conclusion of his year-long journey, has announced that he isn’t going back. "I don't think God exists,” he told NPR's Arun Rath. His year without God will be, it seems, longer than a year.

So what do I think of this? Do I share William Lane Craig's catastrophizing view that Bell's journey is "spiritually disastrous" and that "If this man really does consistently live out an atheistic lifestyle, it could do irreparable harm to the Christian church"? 

No. In fact, it may do the church some good. Much hinges, I think, on whether Bell's journey towards atheism reflects more of the spirit of Simone Weil, or more of the spirit of Blaise Pascal. Let me explain. 

When I first heard of Bell's existential experiment, one thing that immediately came to mind was Simone Weil’s notion that atheism can be a “purification.” This idea may seem strange coming from a religious mystic committed to relinquishing herself to God. But it makes more sense once we pay attention to the terrifying danger she saw in gods of the imagination. 

As Weil puts it, “The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.” Put another way, our imaginations are very good at constructing false gods that block the pathway through which the genuinely divine might enter our souls. (I would add that cultures are good at it, too, so if we simply adopt our notion of God from cultural institutions rather than our own imaginations, we aren't any better off.)

The divine, as Weil sees it, defies conceptualization. At one point Weil says, “I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word.” But she pairs this atheistic assertion with a contrasting claim that is more suggestive than clear: “I am quite sure there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory.”  And as she puts it, “that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion.”

Weil’s theistic counter-claim becomes clearer when we recall key features of her spiritual journey. Her love of God was sparked by unexpected mystical experiences that shattered her understanding of what was possible—mystical encounters with a love “like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face.” But she still “half refused” to accept what she had experienced. As she put it in a letter to her friend and confidante, Father Perrin, 

For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.

Weil made it clear to Father Perrin that it was her intellect, not her love, that resisted the urgings of her mystical experiences. I get the sense that her intellectual resistance was in service to her love. She did not want her love to fall on a false object. She wanted her love to be true. And to keep it true, she had to be rigorously critical of any particular conceptualization of the divine. 

On Weil's view of things, all false images of God must fall before the critical scrutiny of the intellect. Only then will the true God—who transcends our concepts but comes to us in profound experiential encounters—be the object of our love. This isn’t to say that nothing can be said about that to which mystical experience points. After all, Weil herself had things to say. But to treat what one has to say as adequate, and to place one’s hope and devotion in the image one has constructed through one’s words and thoughts—that is, for Weil, the real spiritual disaster.

Weil reminds me here of Socrates. Socrates famously held that one of the greatest impediments to knowledge was false certainty. To dislodge someone’s certainty, to cast them into a place of doubt, was for him a necessary first step in the journey towards truth. Paradoxically, this is so even if the belief happens to be true. If we have a true belief but our certainty exceeds what is warranted, then we are further from the truth than the doubter. We aren’t connected to the truth as the truth, because we cling to it in a manner that's indifferent to truth.

This is essentially the point Simone Weil is making about belief in God. It is what she means when she says, “Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other. The false God who is like the true one in everything, except that we cannot touch him, prevents us from ever coming to the true one.”

Ryan Bell’s journey towards atheism might be just the kind of purification that Weil is talking about: a step in a journey towards truth, whatever that in the end may prove to be. If we are lovers of the truth about the divine, as opposed to lovers of our particular conception of God, then we have nothing to fear from such journeys and everything to gain.

Of course, Bell's atheism might be something else. It is possible that Bell’s shift towards atheism is a product of the kind of self-indoctrination that Blaise Pascal recommends at the conclusion of his famed “wager.” After arguing that we should bet on God’s existence because the costs of doing so are trivial and the potential payoff infinite, Pascal confronts the reality that beliefs aren’t so easily controlled by our decisions. It’s one thing to tell skeptics, “It’s a good pragmatic bet to believe in God”; something else for them to actually shake off their skepticism and believe. 

And so Pascal offers a strategy for attaining faith. And how do skeptics attain faith? “(B)y acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc.” In other words, by immersing themselves in the life of the believer, surrounding themselves with believers and doing as they do. Simone Weil despised this method, by the way, precisely because it could instill belief in anything.

The same method, of course, can be pursued to promote unbelief. As Kurt Vonnegut said in Mother Night, if you pretend to be something long enough, you become what you pretend to be—whether it be a Nazi (as in Vonnegut’s novel), or a Christian…or an atheist. Is that what’s going on in Bell’s case? After a year of operating as if he were an atheist, did atheism sink in like an Aristotelian habit?

Only Bell can answer that for sure. But I doubt it. I doubt it in part because of the trajectory of his spiritual journey. According to one article, Bell was once so religiously conservative, so steeped in the anti-intellectual warnings of fundamentalist Christian culture, that in college he refused to read Voltaire because “writing such as Voltaire’s defiles the soul.”

There is a difference between immersing oneself in a particular worldview to the exclusion of rivals, with the aim of becoming a believer, and exploring an alternative worldview with an openness to being moved and transformed by it. The former treats the worldview in question as a final destination. The latter treats it as part of a journey whose final goal is not entrenchment into the worldview in question, but a deeper insight into the world. 

Pascal is recommending something more like the former—and it is something more like the former which motivated the young Ryan Bell to resist “defiling” his mind with ideas at odds with the worldview he’d chosen as his final destination. But at some point Bell broke away from that Pascalian pattern of belief-reinforcement. He left the rigid domain of false certainty for the realm of doubt and questioning. It seems to me unlikely that, in exploring atheism during his Year Without God, Bell would do so in the spirit of the very self-indoctrination he’d left behind. More likely, I think, is that his existential experiment and its outcome represent an ongoing journey.

In other words, I see Bell’s shift towards atheism as reflecting more of Simone Weil’s spirit than Pascal’s--more an exercise in spiritual purification than atheist indoctrination. Whether this is true or not will be seen in where his journey takes him next—whether he continues his exploration in the spirit that motivated his Year Without God, or whether he takes someone like Richard Dawkins as his model, and sets his heels into atheist ground as trenchantly as he once did into conservative Christian soil. 

But much of what Bell is saying these days reflects more of Simone Weil than Pascal. In one interview, he resists calling his expression of atheism a conclusion, because "conclusion is too strong a word for the provisional place I now stand and work from." This sounds as if atheism is not so much a final destination into which he intends to dig his heels, as it is a place he has come to on his journey. 

And finally, there is this sentiment from his NPR interview: "I think before, I wanted a closer relationship to God, and today I just want a closer relationship with reality." Again I cannot help but think of Weil's words: "If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms."

If there is a God who transcends our understanding, Bell may be closer to that God now than he was a year ago. 

Music and Spirituality: Reflections in the Aftermath of a Recital

For the last month—amidst vacationing and writing book proposals and attending funerals—I’ve been practicing my violin up to three hours a day in preparation for a chamber music concert here in Stillwater. The concert, which took place this weekend, featured two important works in the history of chamber music. Both pieces speak to me powerfully in different ways—and I cannot help but believe, especially when I immerse myself in music the way I get to do only for short periods each summer—that music does more than just appeal to our biological affinities and cultural conditioning; that, in fact, it helps to put us in touch with some truth that defies human language.


The first piece of music we performed the other night was Mozart’s Divertimento—a trio for violin, viola, and cello that has the distinction of being called by Albert Einstein the most perfect trio ever written—as well as the distinction of serving as the model for Beethoven’s first efforts at string composition. Apparently Beethoven didn’t feel ready to compete with Mozart and Haydn in the string quartet genre, and so he cut his teeth on the trio form, using Mozart’s Divertimento as a template for producing a series of wonderful trios of his own (two of which I performed last summer with the same “Cimmeron String Trio” that reassembled this year for the Divertimento). Only later did Beethoven feel confident enough to turn to the quartet, of which he ultimately proved himself the master. (Back in college I wrote a paper on Beethoven’s string quartets because I was so taken with them—especially the late quartets, which I am convinced remain the pinnacle of achievement in the form).

The second piece we performed, with the addition of three more instrumentalists, was the Brahms Sextet. Interestingly, Brahms didn’t feel ready to compete the Beethoven in the string quartet genre. But instead of doing what Beethoven did—write for a small ensemble—Brahms wrote for a larger one (a move more suited to Brahms’ lush style). The resulting sextet is an unapologetically romantic piece of music that is wonderfully inventive and, for that reason among others, devilishly difficult to play well.

As with Mozart in general, the Divertimento possesses a kind of purity and clarity that makes one wonder whether the entire work might not be somehow explicable in terms of a single, elegant mathematical formula. This is not to say it’s formulaic. There is much to surprise the listener (and performer), as well as much to delight. While Mozart followed (and invented) distinct musical forms, he was also willing to stretch them and play with them in novel ways. But when Mozart has the violin play these madly rushing sixteenth note runs, it takes me relatively little practice time to master them. It’s as if every note is exactly the one that is supposed to come next, even when it modulates into a different key partway through the run--and so my fingers just seem to fall into the flow of the notes.

By contrast, a substantially slower triplet run in Brahms takes weeks of practice to master—and even then my fingers are likely to betray me in performance. In part this is because the sequences are less predictable, in part because there are leaps calling for abrupt shifts from one violin position to another. But even so, once one grasps and internalizes what Brahms is doing in one of these triplet runs, it makes sense somehow—it couldn’t be any different than it is and still achieve what Brahms achieved with that particular combination of notes and rhythm.

It’s as if both composers are describing something about reality—but what they have chosen to focus on, the “stories” they have chosen to tell, are different in important ways.

There are those who will say, of course, that the story they are telling has to do entirely with how our brains are wired. Our responsiveness to music, our wonder and delight and anguish as we hear or play a soaring passage on the violin or a resonant, crying melody on the cello—this speaks to discoveries about our brains, discoveries made on an intuitive level by musicians and composers. They have discovered, in effect, that this harmonious combination of notes will resonate in some special way with hard-wired features of human psychology, whereas that dissonance and resolution will trigger a different kind of response—corresponding, perhaps, to what occurs in our brain when we are thirsty and then get something to drink. This, they will say, is what music amounts to: human beings stumbling into the discovery that certain combinations of sounds and rhythms interact with certain features of human brain wiring in predictable and repeatable ways, so as to enable composers and musicians to influence mood and emotion and so communicate feelings without words.

In fact, I think that on a certain level all of this is right—that, in effect, the greatest composers have found ways to express with sounds certain truths about the human brain. The question is whether this is all that is going on. And when I am confronted with this reductionistic thesis, the musician in me cannot help but rebel. In fact, I wonder if my attraction to the notion of transcendence, as well as my affinity for religion in its more mystical and experiential forms, has part of its roots in my lifetime love affair with music. Before I ever dreamed of becoming a philosopher I was a violinist—not exactly a child prodigy, but a talented young musician who seriously considered a career in music, choosing to attend the University of Rochester primarily because of the Eastman School of Music (where I took lessons throughout my college career).

In music I experience something that doesn’t fit readily into the categories permitted by reductive materialism. Or perhaps it is better to say that materialism would force me to explain away something that seems in the moment to be an encounter with a profound truth that defies words. And the musician in me says no--the musician who, this past weekend, exhausted himself in a joint creative effort with several other talented amateurs (and two brilliant composers long dead), muscling through a sore back and heartburn and aching finger joints, entering into the last movements of the Brahms with almost nothing left to give—lifted out of body aches and trembling limbs by a moment of lush unison playing with the cello, or by an exquisite passage in the final movement of the sextet, when the melody is recapitulated in two-note fragments passed around among different instruments.

That musician cannot but believe that, in the words of the great 19th Century German philosopher Hermann Lotze, “what is so fair and full of significance cannot be an accidental product of that which is without significance, but must be either the very Principle of the world or closely related to its creative principle.”

Of course, many will point out that my longing for music to be something “more” doesn’t amount to evidence. Brain chemistry might not only explain the effect music has on people, but also my subjective sense that music puts me in touch with some feature of reality I cannot access in empirical ways. Some critics are even likely to say that there is something pretentious about believing music to be the language of the transcendent: I want something to be the case because it makes my efforts as a musician more significant.

But this last criticism gets things backwards, I think. It’s not that I'm trying to invest my efforts with greater significance by believing that music puts us in contact with some ineffable truth. Rather, I am inspired to engage in these efforts—to practice until my fingers are raw, to put everything I have into an unpaid performance with other amateurs—because I sense in a deep way the significance of what the music has to say.

If I didn’t believe in my bones that music touched on something profound, I wouldn’t bother with it. Every summer a part of me thinks I’m crazy to work that hard for one evening in front of a hundred people. And every year I return to the effort—drawn by something beyond myself, something that seems real and true, something that, through music, I can touch in a mystical way. When I hear about the transcendent experiences of Simone Weil and other mystics, I have a glimmering of what they’ve been through because of music—because, in moments of intense engagement with music, I come close to touching what they have touched.

Believing in the transcendent significance of music is in this sense pragmatically fruitful. It motivates me to do what I otherwise would not do, to work for what I otherwise wouldn’t work for. And when I do that work, I feel moments of connection with something greater than myself. And so my belief is deepened, and its pragmatic power enhanced.

The question is what that means. Does the pragmatic value of a conviction, along with the ineffable sense of its confirmation in human activity, speak to the conviction’s truth? Or are such pragmatic considerations irrelevant when it comes to the matter of truth? Do the deep longings of our souls suggest the tug of something beyond us, the way that the pull on an iron rod speaks to the presence of a magnet?  Does our sense of music’s significance us give any reason to suppose that it is anything more than a by-product of that which is meaningless and dead?

I’ve articulated my own answers to these questions a bit more formally elsewhere on this blog—for example here. For now, I simply want to raise the questions in a way that, I hope, reveals why I don’t think the answers are obvious—and in a way that I hope invites reflection and debate among readers of this blog.

Let me close with the words of one of my favorite authors, who found in music something very close to what I discover there. So here they are, the words of Kurt Vonnegut:

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC"

I haven't checked to find out if that became his epitaph in truth.