Forbidden Knowledge
On open conversation, censorship, and why children learn the names of dinosaurs.
This is a revised version of an essay first published in 2020.
In the early nineties, there was a commercial on Canadian TV that I still remember today. It was for a magazine called Dinosaurs! (The magazine’s exclamation point, not mine.) The enthusiastic voice-over highlighted the FREE TOY that came with each issue: a piece of plastic shaped like a rib, or spine, or some other bone of the king of the dinosaurs, so that by COLLECTING THEM ALL I could put together the skeleton of a T-REX. As if that wasn’t enough, this skeleton GLOWED IN THE DARK.
I viscerally remember the urgency with which I yanked at parental sleeves and felt that if I didn’t have my own glowing rex skeleton, I would throw up. This anxiety was matched by the excitement that vibrated through my bones as I began saving my allowance (fifty-cents a week) and then purchased the first of what promised to be a long-running series. I don’t recall now if I ever collected more than the first issue, or whether I ever fell asleep next to the pale green glow of a Lilliputian Tyrannosaurus rex.
I wasn’t alone in my morbid enthusiasm for the monstrous dinosaur. Countless children the world over adore this killing machine. Are all these kids simply bloodthirsty sociopaths? Possibly. But there’s a scene in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park that offers a different explanation. Our palaeontologist protagonist notes that children wield the names of these “terrible lizards” as a form of power. Those looming skeletons dominating museum halls are symbols of authority figures, of the daunting reality into which a young individuating consciousness emerges. To name a thing is, in some important sense, to control it.
The same is true of information. To know something is to reallocate power from the known to the knower. To understand something is to see how it works and, therefore, how it can be made to fail. This is why an educated populace is every dictator’s biggest fear. According to Seneca, Roman slaves weren’t required to wear clothing that identified them as such, because if they saw how many slaves there were, they might have overthrown the ruling class. As with Rumpelstiltskin, whose name was his undoing, and as with all researchers seeking information about the disease they wish to cure, knowledge confers power. So children learn and recite the names of these beasts to put them in their place.
The power of naming can go wrong. There’s a scene in the Jurassic Park movie in which Alan Grant makes a specious argument that the word “Velociraptor” lends credence to the (now well-established) theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds. “Even the word raptor,” Grant asserts, “means ‘bird of prey’.” My father’s scoff always followed, and then the explanation of why this wasn’t evidence of evolution, then the reaffirmation that God made dinosaurs and birds in the creation week. “Which is why,” a Christian friend once told me, “evolution can’t be called science.”
Our church saw evolution as liberal propaganda, and the word “theory” — without which the term “evolution” was never uttered — meant to them something like: “A shot-in-the-dark by people with no hope of finding the truth as long as they leave the Bible out of the laboratory.” In their minds, the word theory undermined the validity of Darwin’s ideas. The universe was called “creation” because it was created. In the beginning was the word, the word made everything, and then Adam named all of its creatures. If nothing else, an upbringing in fundamentalist Christianity has given me a solid grounding in the value of language.
I was permitted to read Dinosaurs! but my exploration of the facts of fossils was accompanied by a parental commentary rebutting the age of the earth, the epochal distance between Dinosauria and Homo sapiens, and the gradual evolutionary process by which they were created. I was allowed to watch Jurassic Park, but every time the trailer for it ran before its release and the voice-over announced that this was an adventure “sixty-five million years in the making”, my father countered, “That’s a lie.” Every time.
I silently resented this constant endeavour to shield me from science, even though I was a believer too, but this frustration was tempered by relief at being free to watch and read those movies and books about dinosaurs. It could have been the case that they were thrown into the dump of things deemed out-of-bounds — books, movies, and music that could invite demons into our lives. I wasn’t subjected to any demonic activity, but I certainly cried myself to sleep more than once as I worried about the Hell from which demons came and to which I feared going.
In the church of my youth, sinful things were banished, and the justification for censorship was some variation on, “The Bible says so,” which also took the form of, “The pastor said so,” or from a parent, “Because I said so.” A brief ledger of the things I was restricted from engaging with includes Dungeons & Dragons, Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, all Halloween festivities, and, predictably, Harry Potter. Just like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, these were magical objects whose knowledge, consumed by the unwary, was dangerous enough that they had to be banned. Or so I was told.
When I eventually lost my faith, the first change in my thinking was to endorse gay rights, followed by ditching my guilt over reading “evil” books and watching “sinful” movies. While these were no small alterations, they were the easiest parts of the metamorphosis from believer to atheist. This is undoubtedly because the camp that was against such things was closed and showed me only what it wanted me to see; the camp that supported gay rights believed in freedom of information and open dialogue. I learned that if your position is sound, honest conversation need not be feared. Actually, it does great things for the spread and acceptance of your views. I also learned to look more closely at what I’m told I shouldn’t see.
When I was sixteen, my church announced a letter-writing campaign against Channel 4’s hiring of a gay presenter for children’s television. The official reason for their antipathy to Channel 4’s new hire was that children needed “protecting” from homosexual propaganda. If children were taught that being gay is fine, guess what children would grow up to believe, and then guess where they’d spend eternity. All of this came rushing back to me when, some years later, Russia announced new laws banning anyone from teaching children about homosexuality. The full title of the bill is “For The Purpose Of Protecting Children From Information Advocating For A Denial Of Traditional Family Values”. Note what this announces it’s protecting people from: information.
The people being “protected” in all these instances of censorship are children. What would be an appropriate response to the person or organisation that tells you, an adult, that you’re not allowed to read books about witchcraft or watch movies with too much swearing? What if this person or group insisted that you shouldn’t be free to watch films that contain racist tropes, lest you not have sufficient intelligence or moral acuity to discern the bad from the good, to analyse what you’re seeing and engage these artforms in cultural conversation? What if works of art, statues of historical figures, and monuments to moments in our national histories were pushed under that parental rug so that no one could see them? Perhaps a sign would be put up in their place to account for their removal: “For The Purpose Of Protecting Everyone From Information Not Conforming To The Mob’s Values.”
Perhaps you think the hop from the one kind of censorship to this other kind is too great a leap — but consider that in both cases, the means are justified by the imagined ends. A person who sincerely believes that atheists burn for eternity in Hell is acting rationally (within the confines of their irrational belief) when they do whatever it takes to keep loved ones from suffering that fate. Equally, when the goal is the abolition of racism, toppling a lump of sculpted stone in memory of a slave-trader might seem like no great cost.
For the communist revolutionary Sergei Nechaev, the “merciless destruction” of the church and state was so important that everything from blackmail to murder was permitted in the service of inciting the “common people” to rebel. Dostoevsky based one of his central characters in Demons (1871) on this dissident and had him voice an impeccable distillation of his pseudo-nihilistic creed:
“From unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.”
When all methods are permitted, you become free to restrict others in order to maintain your own “freedom”. When you convince yourself that only evil people don’t tacitly endorse your actions — tearing down a statue, banning a book, or persecuting an out-group — you’ve granted yourself not only an excuse to condemn them but an obligation to do so. This is, after all, the only way to maintain your freedom from Satan, or political opposition, or offensive views.
Of course, there’s no comparison between raising children to be homophobes and, say, tearing down a statue of a slave-trader. There is, however, a direct comparison to be made, and I am making it, between the justifications for both acts. Both are attempts to sever ties with an evil that would undo us. For the fundamentalist Christian, associations with the secular world and its tolerance of gay rights must be broken; for the reactionary left, links to the past must be cut from the present. And both groups envision a utopia awaiting all of those who survive the great purge — a Biblical Heaven or a socialist state.
Fundamentalist Christianity is an impoverished tradition in many ways, not least for its lack of Saint Augustine’s openness of heart and spirit. The man who wrote, “Lord, make me chaste, but not just yet,” had lived enough to know something of the “sinful” world. And in his great work of autobiography, he makes full use of this experience, not suppressing it or hiding from it, but revealing his journey through youthful sin to become the man of God we know him as.
Those who seek to proselytise would do well to note that Augustine is someone who’s reached unbelievers not by painting himself as a holier-than-thou symbol of purity, but as a man who’s struggled with the world as the rest of us do. Augustine learned from his past, he didn’t erase it. Rather than trying to hide certain kinds of sin from me, my parents and church might have taught me to engage with it meaningfully.
This is precisely what happened with something I’d loved as a child and rediscovered as an adult. It wasn’t only the Dinosaurs! magazine that I loved as a boy; I was also smitten with Tintin. For many years, I was unable to satisfy my completionist urge to read all of the young journalist’s adventures, because the second in the series, Tintin in the Congo, was mysteriously absent from every bookstore I visited. It wasn’t until I began re-collecting Tintin as an adult that I learned the reason for this gap in the series — it was because of the overtly racist depictions of the Congolese people.
And then one day I discovered a shrink-wrapped “collector’s edition” of the title, newly published, accompanied by a foreword “describing the publication history of Tintin’s African adventure, and placing it in its historical context”. Here I had a new Tintin comic, plus an examination of content no ethically sound person would want to ignore simply to preserve the fun of a children’s story. A definitional win-win.
Back in 2020, HBO removed Gone With the Wind from its library. The company’s handling of this move could have been smoother, with a little forethought given to messaging around their reasons for pulling the film. However, just as this apparent “cancellation” was added to the long list of censorious removals of statues, movies, television shows, and, of course, books, HBO released a statement. They’d decided to open up the conversation, offering a clear example of how to get this right. Here’s a key part of that statement:
“[W]hen we return the film to HBO Max, it will return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those [racist] depictions, but will be presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. If we are to create a more just, equitable and inclusive future, we must first acknowledge and understand our history.”
All in all, that strikes me as infinitely more productive than anything gained from merely banning a book, or pulling a statue from its plinth. Instead of hiding from the debate, this is the beginning of a new conversation.