portal: Libraries and the Academy

Questioning Library Neutrality

The ordinary individual, by exercising critical judgment, will select the good and reject the bad. We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe.¹

American Library Association

In the last 10 years or so, and especially since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, "neutrality" has become a dirty word for many librarians committed to social justice. In 2008, Library Juice Press published Questioning Library Neutrality, a collection of articles from the Progressive Librarian that critiqued the idea of library neutrality from various perspectives.² Since then, articles and presentations rejecting the

[End Page 55] concept of neutrality as a fundamental flaw in the traditional ethos of librarianship have become increasingly common in the mainstream discourse of the profession. A few examples illustrate the trend:

• • The American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in 2015 included the presentation "'But We're Neutral!' and Other Librarian Fictions Confronted by #critlib."³

• • In 2017, American Libraries published an editorial titled "Never Neutral: Critical Librarianship and Technology."⁴

• • In 2018, the president's program at the ALA Midwinter Meeting asked: "Are libraries neutral? Have they ever been? Should they be?"⁵

The critique of neutrality includes three strands. First, critics argue that maintaining a professional stance of impartiality undermines the ability of librarians to advocate for social justice through their work. Neutrality encourages moral cowardliness—conscious or not—by allowing librarians to hide behind false claims of evenhandedness as they capitulate to an unjust status quo. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu summarized this argument when he observed: "If you are in a situation where an elephant is sitting on the tail of a mouse and you say, 'Oh no, no, no, I am neutral,' the mouse is not going to appreciate your neutrality."⁶ For critics, library neutrality means supporting the strong against the weak, the oppressors against the oppressed, and the majority against the marginalized.

The second strand of the critique argues that neutrality is a myth. In Social Justice and Library Work, Stephen Bales asserts that "library neutrality is a myth hiding a bias …all positions are political positions (some practitioners are just more honest in their admission of this)."⁷ According to this argument, those who assert that libraries ought to be neutral ignore deeper structural forces that shape our social world. False claims of neutrality legitimize the prerogatives of privileged social groups by making their advantages appear natural and inevitable. The concept of "white privilege" illustrates the argument. It is hard for white people to acknowledge that biased social institutions tend to give them more wealth and power because such an admission undermines meritocratic justifications of the existing distribution of social advantage based on the assumption that people basically get what they deserve through hard work.⁸ For critics, anyone who believes in the myth of neutrality fails to see how current institutions might be changed to improve social justice.

The third strand of the critique argues that neutrality diminishes the importance of librarianship by reducing librarians to mere technicians. According to librarian Joseph Good:

Neutral responses to the vital issues of gay marriage, African-American reparations, and affirmative action continually jeopardize the library's relevance in contemporary society. If the librarian cannot be motivated to take a stand on pressing social issues out of a sense of moral duty, certainly the librarian should break his or her neutrality in the name of self-interest.⁹

If librarians merely process, manage, and distribute information without evaluating it, Good believes that they have minimal social importance. Good's anxiety that neutrality [End Page 56] neuters librarianship resonates with broader anxieties about the value of librarianship in the digital age. At a time when librarians wonder if the Internet will render the profession superfluous, machines seem more likely to replace librarians who simply process data than those who are politically engaged.

Defending Library Neutrality

Somewhat surprisingly, the critique of neutrality has encountered little resistance in the literature of librarianship so far. In 2014, a library director blogging about the "Myth of Library Neutrality" observed:

I recently attempted to find information supporting the idea of library neutrality, but had a hard time finding anything other than opinion pieces by those questioning the concept. It looks like what we have ended up with is outdated discourse that does not reflect what the library profession is doing and how they actually feel about it.¹⁰

In his 2015 book, The Dialectic of Academic Librarianship, Stephen Bales points to what he sees as a

dearth of recent scholarly publications in favor of nonpartisan librarianship. Other than opinion pieces and listserv disputes, calls for neutrality, it seems, are beginning to be relegated to the official statements of professional associations, boilerplate lectures in college classrooms, and textbooks, all of which often benefit by avoiding openly stated political positions.¹¹

If belief in library neutrality is as pervasive as the critique supposes, one wonders why persistent criticism has not met with more opposition in the literature. Perhaps, as Bales suggests, the critique has been so successful that it is no longer possible to offer a rational defense of neutrality. Perhaps, in contrast, the virtues of neutrality are so obvious to most librarians that they see no need for theoretical justification. Perhaps the pro and con debate about neutrality at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in 2018 reflects a growing awareness of the critique and will lead to increasing scholarly debate.

For now, the most vigorous defense of library neutrality can still be found in a 1975 book by David Berninghausen, The Flight from Reason: Essays on Intellectual Freedom in the Academy, the Press, and the Library.¹² The central essay of the book, "Social Responsibility vs. the Library Bill of Rights," was published in Library Journal in 1972 as part of an intense debate about the ethics of librarianship that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to the widespread social protests of that era.

Berninghausen was director of the School of Library Science at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and had been a strong advocate of intellectual freedom throughout his career. He chaired the Intellectual Freedom Committee (IFC) of the ALA for several years and supported intellectual freedom as a member of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he sought to make intellectual freedom a fundamental ethical mandate of the library profession. He fought against efforts to force librarians to sign loyalty oaths during the McCarthy era, when there were widespread accusations of suspected Communist activities, often with little evidence.¹³ He also strove to make the ALA more effective in supporting librarians who had been disciplined for resisting attempts to censor library collections.¹⁴ [End Page 57]

Berninghausen's 1972 essay was prompted by debate within the ALA about whether the social responsibilities of librarians should go beyond protecting intellectual freedom as defined by the Library Bill of Rights. In the ALA, as in many other organizations in the 1970s, the consensus New Deal liberalism of the post-World War II era was being challenged by radicals opposed to racial segregation and the Vietnam War. A growing number of Americans believed that there were fundamental flaws in American society that could be resolved only by radical change. ALA members committed to these ideas formed the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) and argued that librarians ought to take a clear stand in favor of progressive social movements. They proposed a broader definition of "social responsibility" that contrasted with the ideal of intellectual freedom that Berninghausen had championed throughout his career. In 1970, the SRRT issued a report that framed their understanding of the social role of the library as an alternative to the more limited political agenda that Berninghausen had defended as chair of the IFC:

There are two conflicting definitions of Social Responsibility held by members of the ALA at present. The first is traditional, conservative and variously phrased: "The function of a library is to have factual material on both sides of the question. The library is a reservoir for information and our business is to conserve it and wait till our users require its contents. The library is a source of ideas, not a promoter of them."

The second definition of "social responsibility" is considered radical, new, activist. It can best be summed up by a definition put forth by ALA's Committee on Organization (COO): "Social responsibilities can be defined as the relationships that librarians and libraries have to non-library problems that relate to the social welfare of our society."¹⁵

Although the report embraces intellectual freedom, it asserts that defending intellectual freedom represents an overly narrow political agenda. In a period of intense social conflict, the SRRT wanted librarians to take a stand on broader questions of social justice.

Berninghausen maintained that adopting the SRRT's radical definition of social responsibility would destroy rather than expand the ALA's political effectiveness. In his eyes, taking an activist position on "non-library problems" meant abandoning effective commitment to intellectual freedom. He argued that a library could be an "advocacy" library or a "Library Bill of Rights" library, but not both. By promoting specific positions on questions of ongoing social debate, libraries undermined their role as impartial advocates in favor of open-minded democratic discourse: "America's librarians cannot afford to be neutral about their commitment to preserve the freedom to read for everyone. At the same time, as professionals, they must remain neutral about the issues of the day regardless of what they may do as private citizens."¹⁶ Although Berninghausen acknowledged that the country faced many social problems and that librarians had an obligation to contribute to the solution of these problems as citizens, he argued that librarians' commitment to the professional ideal of intellectual freedom had to take priority over personal political commitments while working in the library.

The question is why Berninghausen believed that advocacy was incompatible with intellectual freedom. Why is fighting racism, economic inequality, or nuclear proliferation incompatible with defending patrons' right to read whatever they want? The conflict is not immediately obvious. In fact, the AAUP takes the opposite position for its members. For university professors, having intellectual freedom means having the right to express [End Page 58] their political opinions without fear of institutional retribution. All that the AAUP requires is a commitment to scholarly accuracy and the willingness to "show respect to the opinions of others" in intellectual debate.¹⁷ In the academy, defending intellectual freedom means creating an environment that promotes open-minded discussion of ideas where everyone is encouraged to articulate, defend, and justify their values. So, why would Berninghausen believe that intellectual freedom in the library requires that librarians suppress their opinions in their professional activities?

In hindsight, I think that Berninghausen's attempt to answer this question was marred by his intense engagement with the ongoing political struggles within the ALA. As the chair of the IFC, he saw the SRRT's rejection of the "traditional, conservative" interpretation of social responsibility as a direct attack against himself, his committee, and the ideals that he had championed throughout his career. Moreover, he was dismayed by the apparent embrace of the SRRT's position by the library press. His book includes extensive complaints about Library Journal's abandonment of objective journalism, in part stemming from his belief that he had been unfairly criticized by the magazine.

The inflammatory title of Berninghausen's book reflects his unwillingness—in the heat of an ongoing political fight—to grant a fair hearing to his opponents. For Berninghausen, advocacy was incompatible with intellectual freedom because activist librarians had taken a "flight from reason" to embrace irrational dogmatism. For example, he argued that librarians who thought that libraries should endorse the environmental politics of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring prioritized "gut feelings" over rational debate. They "feel that they are right because they are sincere in their beliefs and because they hold strong convictions."¹⁸ There was no middle ground in Berninghausen's analysis that would allow a librarian to endorse a radical political position without becoming a "rigid," "intransigent" extremist who sincerely believed "that anyone who does not view the world precisely as they do should be forced to conform or cease to exist."¹⁹ Berninghausen believed that adopting the SRRT's vision of librarianship was equivalent to adopting left-wing political dogmatism just as damaging to democratic values as the right-wing McCarthyism that Berninghausen had fought against in the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, due to the inherent right-leaning political tendencies of the nation, Bern-inghausen argued that the activism of left-wing extremists almost always contributed to the ultimate triumph of right-wing extremism in American politics by undermining democratic traditions that hold all forms of authoritarianism at bay.

Berninghausen's intransigence prevented him from acknowledging that political activism is not inherently inconsistent with fair and open-minded debate. A librarian can be completely committed to the arguments of Silent Spring without closing her mind to alternative perspectives. Antinuclear activists can try to convince other citizens of the accuracy of their views without seeking to impose their conclusions on others through force or censorship. Most of the librarians who responded to Berninghausen's original article in Library Journal disagreed with him on these grounds.²⁰ They argued that the irrational library ideologues that Berninghausen admonished in his essay existed only in his imagination. They failed to see themselves in [End Page 59] Berninghausen's account and did not agree that advocating for a broader interpretation of a librarian's social responsibility meant abandoning their commitment to intellectual freedom.

A Deeper Moral Dilemma

Although Berninghausen's attacks against his critics weakened his argument, I still believe that his description of a stark contrast between "social responsibility" and "intellectual freedom" points to a troubling moral dilemma at the heart of librarianship in a liberal democratic society. The dilemma results from two powerful moral intuitions that pull librarians in opposite directions whenever their own moral values differ significantly from the moral values of their patrons. I will call these intuitions Proposition A (activist) and Proposition N (neutrality).

Proposition A asserts that we ought to do everything in our power to prevent injustice regardless of whether we started it. A witness who fails to prevent a crime when she has the power do so is almost as culpable as the person who commits the crime, in the eyes of most. And the more power someone has, the more responsibility she has. A trained, gun-carrying policeman has greater responsibility to stop a mugging than does a frail, elderly citizen. Bosses have more responsibility to limit injustice in their organizations than do their subordinates. This intuitive sense of responsibility to fight injustice initiated by others—or by society at large—is at the heart of discontent with library neutrality. According to the critics, librarians who fail to use the influence conferred on them by their education and their social status to reduce ongoing social injustice are as culpable as witnesses who do nothing to stop ongoing crimes.

Proposition N asserts that it is wrong for someone in a position of authority to impose her moral values on others. Most citizens in liberal democratic societies believe in the fundamental moral autonomy of their fellow citizens. Government officials should not censor political ideas that they disagree with. Bosses should not impose their beliefs on employees. The desire to respect the moral autonomy of all citizens is at the heart of the ideal of library neutrality. When the Freedom to Read Statement of the ALA says that librarians "do not foster education by imposing as mentors the patterns of their own thought," it asks librarians to respect the intellectual autonomy of their patrons.²¹ Instead of serving as moral educators, librarians provide information that allows patrons to make up their own minds.

When the overall moral worldview of a librarian is largely in harmony with the worldview of her patrons, propositions A and N usually are compatible with each other. The dilemma comes when librarians encounter patrons whose moral ends are fundamentally at odds with their own. Then, it often seems that the best way for librarians to use their authority to prevent injustice is to use their influence to impose the "patterns of their own thought" on the patron. Thus, the only way to accomplish proposition A is to violate proposition N, or vice versa. A few thought experiments illustrate the dilemma. [End Page 60]

Separation of Spheres

In these thought experiments, the tension between advocacy and neutrality does not necessarily derive from irrationality, dogmatism, or an unwillingness to consider alternative points of view. It comes from something deeper and more profound—from our society's ongoing debate about the legitimacy of conflicting systems of moral value in which reasonable people may disagree. Three factors lead to the librarians' dilemmas:

1. Moral and political beliefs matter. Is socialism a utopian fantasy or a viable political option? Is homosexuality a natural form of sexual desire or a dangerous perversion? Actions based on the wrong answers to these questions lead to injustice and suffering.

2. There is no universal agreement about what is morally good, and there probably never will be. As one social theorist has argued: "Many of our deepest moral and metaphysical beliefs, like how to live a good life or which God to worship, are inherently contestable—reasonable people can and will disagree."²²

3. Librarians serve as an interface (gatekeeper?) between patrons and the information that patrons seek to develop and defend their values. Our authority comes from our official role as mediators between patrons and organized collections of evidence that support different points of view. If we choose, we can use our authority to favor our own views at the expense of alternatives. Our influence derives from several aspects of library work:

1. a. As in my thought experiments, the reference interview gives librarians a chance to guide patrons to data and arguments consistent with our own views.

2. b. Collection and preservation decisions can favor information consistent with our own values. [End Page 62]

3. c. Metadata created by librarians to organize collections can impose moral judgment through categorization by, for example, labeling some religious communities as cults or some forms of sexual desire as psychological disorders.²³

4. d. Search algorithms created (or adopted) by librarians can make it easier to find information consistent with our own values and harder to find evidence that challenges our biases.²⁴

So, when and how should we use our professional authority to direct patrons to the correct moral views as we see them? Perhaps there is no systematic theoretical resolution to the conflict between proposition A and proposition N. In practice, most librarians will be guided by intuition and experience when they encounter these dilemmas in their work. Can we go beyond that? Can we determine if proposition A or proposition N ought to have priority when they come into conflict in the work of librarianship? That, to me, is the deep question at the heart of the debate about library neutrality.

Despite Berninghausen's hyperbole, his essay offers a powerful means of addressing the dilemma through a strict segregation between our private and our professional lives. He argues that librarians can meet the demands of both proposition A and proposition N by applying them in different spheres. "In their private, personal lives, librarians exercise their rights as citizens to play active roles as partisan proponents and supporters of social, political, or religious causes and organizations."²⁵ As citizens, family members, and friends, proposition A takes precedence, and librarians should use their influence to fight for social justice as they understand it. However, as librarians, proposition N takes precedence: "In their professional work, which they consider a part of the communication system by which human beings maintain contact with the world around them, librarians maintain as high a degree of impartiality and neutrality as is humanly possible."²⁶ For Berninghausen, the library is an institution devoted to the support of intellectual freedom for all citizens, and the goals of the institution take precedence over the private moral convictions of librarians in their professional work. At times, this priority leads to internal conflict because our professional commitments prevent us from performing moral acts we would be obligated to perform in our private lives. However, the importance of preserving the long-term value of the library as a source of intellectual autonomy for everyone makes professional restraint worthwhile.

Although Berninghausen strives to provide moral clarity, the blunt alternative that he offers between social activism and librarianship may have the opposite effect for many librarians. If the Library Bill of Rights requires parking our moral values outside every time we go to work, maybe something is wrong with it. Why should librarians restrict their social advocacy precisely in the arena where their training and expertise give them the greatest social influence? Why exactly are the Freedom to Read Statement and the Library Bill of Rights so important to librarianship in the first place?

A Library Neutrality Syllogism

Answering these questions has been difficult for me because the values expressed in the Library Bill of Rights seem so obvious that they hardly need justification. Who could disagree when the Library Bill of Rights asserts that "materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation"? [End Page 63] Who could argue when the ALA's Freedom to Read Statement says that "the ordinary individual, by exercising critical judgment, will select the good and reject the bad"? For most of my career, such sentiments have been easy platitudes, the inevitable moral landscape of librarianship, rather than controversial political commitments that could be challenged. But the critique of library neutrality interrupts my dogmatic slumbers. Recent United States elections make me wonder if librarians really ought to "trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe," as the Freedom to Read Statement asserts. In a "post truth" era, faith in the critical judgment of the ordinary individuals may be disastrous. Can librarians really assume that patrons will recognize fake news for what it is if we do not "protect" them from propaganda or if we refuse to "foster education by imposing as mentors the patterns of [our] own thought"? The neutrality debate forces me to interrogate the deeper political assumptions implicit in the platitudes so confidently expressed in mid-twentieth century ALA documents. Are they still viable for twenty-first century librarianship?

My attempt to think through these questions has led me to the library neutrality syllogism summarized here. The following sections of the essay will flesh out the steps of the argument and then respond to potential objections.

Libraries and the Enlightenment

Bivens-Tatum traces the historical origins and the ongoing "telos" of American librarianship to ideas developed by European Enlightenment thinkers in the seventeenth century, who believed in the power of human reason rather than traditional authority. Although the scholarship about the Enlightenment is vast, Bivens-Tatum relies on a recent analysis by intellectual historian Jonathan Israel to summarize Enlightenment ideals. In A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy, Israel argues:

Radical Enlightenment is a set of basic principles that can be summed up concisely as: democracy; racial and sexual equality; individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press …Its chief maxim is that all men have the same basic needs, rights, and status irrespective of what they believe or what religious, economic, or ethnic group they belong to, and that consequently all ought to be treated alike, on the basis of equity, whether black or white, male or female, religious or nonreligious.²⁸

Israel does not argue that all seventeenth century Enlightenment thinkers were ready to grant "full freedom of thought" to everyone immediately. Many famous Enlightenment philosophers denied equal rights to women, non-Christians, the poor, or non-Europeans. Many American revolutionaries steeped in Enlightenment ideals proclaimed that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence while they continued to own slaves.²⁹ Nevertheless, Israel argues that Enlightenment thinkers developed a new understanding of the relationship between the individual and society that encouraged democratic equality. As Enlightenment ideas became more successful, that ideal was applied to broader and more inclusive groups of human beings.

The belief that all people are capable of reason and ought to have the freedom to develop their own moral and political ideals is central to Enlightenment values. In his famous 1784 essay "What Is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant stated, "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another."³⁰ The idea that everyone can reason for themselves undermines paternalistic forms of religion and society, which assume that most people are not capable of finding the truth on their own. Traditional pre-Enlightenment rulers in Europe believed that access to truth was limited to a small, educated elite and that political power should be restricted to a small class of aristocrats. Most people were destined to serve the will of God or the needs of the state rather than to pursue their own ends. The liberal conception of society as an institution that can only be justified by the benefits it brings to its individual citizens is built on the Enlighten-ment's ideal of autonomy.

Bivens-Tatum argues that American libraries have earned social legitimacy based on their promise to promote Enlightenment values. Academic libraries primarily serve the modern university's quest for knowledge as an end unto itself. Before the Civil War, most American universities focused on moral training for ministers and political elites in specific religious traditions. Because "instruction was dependent on studying a few classical texts closely, or through recitation from textbooks, there was hardly any need for academic libraries to support the curricula." College libraries were "just not that important" because there was little need for intellectual exploration beyond the approved [End Page 65] texts.³¹ Only when American universities began to adopt the Enlightenment model of German universities at the end of the nineteenth century did American academic libraries became important. As the search for new knowledge became the primary purpose of the university, large and well-organized libraries were needed to store the endless accumulation of learning and to support the independent exploration of scholars.

American public libraries gained popular support as a means of promoting the intellectual self-development of democratic citizens. Bivens-Tatum demonstrates that the earliest publicly funded libraries—also built in the middle to late nineteenth century—were justified as a supplement to public schools because they allowed adults to continue the education that the schools had started. Access to a library was valuable to democratic society because "the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundations of social order, which are constantly presenting themselves, and which we, as a people, are constantly required to decide."³² Although there has been debate about whether public libraries actually do enlighten the public instead of merely entertaining them, justifications for using tax dollars to pay for libraries continue to focus on their role in promoting the free inquiry necessary for a liberal democracy.³³

Bivens-Tatum does not address the Freedom to Read Statement directly, but the document buttresses the connection that he makes between the Enlightenment and the ethos of American librarianship. The language used by the ALA in the 1953 statement closely resembles Kant's 1784 essay on enlightenment. According to Kant, "Nothing is required for this enlightenment, however, except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters …The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among mankind."³⁴ Kant's emphasis on intellectual independence is mirrored in the ALA's credo: "We believe that free communication is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture."³⁵ The public library embodies the intellectual self-reliance prized by Kant. Unlike a school or a church where intellectual development is directed by a master, the library creates an open intellectual environment where individuals are guided by their own curiosity.

I believe that Bivens-Tatum succeeds in his effort to trace the origins and ongoing purpose of library values to the Enlightenment. His historical account shows that the ideals of librarianship in a liberal democracy are not eternal truths inherent in the universe but are embedded in specific social institutions designed to achieve specific political ends. [End Page 66]

Liberal Neutrality

The thesis of liberal neutrality was developed by several American political philosophers in the late twentieth century in response to the same political conflicts that led to the ALA debate about library neutrality during the 1970s. In a famous 1978 essay on "Liberalism," Ronald Dworkin asked if liberalism still was a viable political philosophy after the disaster of the Vietnam War—conducted by Americans who called themselves liberals—and the dissolution of the New Deal liberal consensus. In the 1970s, many believed that Vietnam "exposed hidden connections between liberalism and exploitation" and decided that "the line between liberalism and conservatism was …[a] sham."³⁶ To continue to believe in liberalism as a morally coherent political philosophy, Dworkin sought to find a deeper principle beneath the flawed policies of Cold War politicians.

The principle that Dworkin proposed is that liberal "government must be neutral on what might be called the question of the good life."³⁷ Because people have differing ideas about "what gives value to life," liberals believe that the only way "for the government to treat all its citizens as free, or as independent, or with equal dignity" is to allow everyone to live according to their own standards of virtue as much as is practically possible. According to Dworkin, the ideal of liberal neutrality is compatible with differing political and economic policies. Dworkin himself supported a market economy modified by income redistribution and a social safety net but thought that liberal neutrality also was compatible with more extreme versions of laissez-faire or with socialism. The key difference between liberalism and competing political philosophies is not a matter of specific economic policies but the fundamental belief that citizens ought to decide for themselves how to live their lives. Non-liberal political philosophies assume that the government must have its own "theory of what human beings ought to be" and then develop policies that encourage citizens to live according to appropriate standards of virtue.³⁸ Liberalism focuses on increasing the autonomy of citizens to choose their own version of the good life, whereas other forms of government encourage (with more or less force) citizens to live a good life as the government has defined it.

In Political Liberalism (1993), John Rawls, perhaps the most influential American political philosopher of the twentieth century, built a complete system of political morality out of the insights in Dworkin's essay.³⁹ According to Rawls, pluralistic democratic societies are composed of groups of people who believe in a wide variety of "comprehensive" moral doctrines, including Catholicism, Lutheranism, Islam, Utilitarianism, Kantianism, Marxism, and many others. Comprehensive moral philosophies offer a thoroughgoing account of the universe and human nature to explain the standards of virtue that ought to govern human behavior. Differing comprehensive philosophies offer conflicting accounts. For example, Muslims believe that human behavior ought to be consistent with the word of God as transcribed by Muhammad in the Quran, whereas Utilitarians dismiss all forms of religious belief and argue that human behavior ought to be governed by the desire to produce the greatest amount of collective happiness for humanity. Other comprehensive moral philosophies offer many other incompatible theories of virtue.

According to Rawls, most political philosophers in the past assumed that political virtue must be embedded in a comprehensive moral doctrine. To build a just society, the philosopher assumes that leaders must first evaluate the various moral systems available [End Page 67] to them. Then, after choosing the right comprehensive theory of value, leaders can evaluate specific political policies based on how well the policies promote their chosen standards of virtue. Rawls considers "political liberalism" an alternative to comprehensive political philosophies because it is based on limited standards of political justice that need not choose between competing comprehensive theories of morality. In a pluralistic democratic society, Rawls believes that almost everyone can agree on shared standards of social justice even if they never will agree about the existence of God or other contested moral questions. Social justice in a liberal society focuses on the virtues of shared civic life, in which diverse communities with differing moral ideals must cooperate to achieve social ends, rather than on the virtues of comprehensive moral systems.

Governmental neutrality between differing comprehensive systems of value is a fundamental feature of justice in a politically liberal state, according to Rawls. Neutrality is necessary to achieve a state that can be legitimate for everyone regardless of their comprehensive system of values. Because no one would agree that a society that systematically suppresses her own values is just, everyone must agree not to use the power of the state to impose their views on others. For everyone who agrees to play by the rules of liberal democracy—and does not use force or intimidation to impose their beliefs on others—the state should not privilege any one view above others.

The University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who adopted Rawls's political liberalism, offers a powerful explanation of how governmental neutrality promotes a society in which all citizens are treated with dignity:

Respect in political liberalism is, first and foremost, respect for persons, not respect for the doctrines they hold, for the grounding of those doctrines, or for anything else about them. It is because we respect persons that we think that their comprehensive doctrines deserve space to unfold themselves, and deserve respectful, nonderogatory treatment from government …For a public official in a leading role to say "X's doctrine is not as well grounded as Y's" is, inevitably, to denigrate X, and we want our political principles to show equal respect to X and Y.⁴⁰

Although Nussbaum supports Rawls's overall theory, she develops an important critique of one aspect of his argument. Rawls thought that liberal societies should be open to all "reasonable" doctrines. So, Nussbaum asks, what makes a doctrine unreasonable? How do we determine what doctrines ought not be tolerated in a pluralistic democracy? Rawls, at times, tried to define unreasonable doctrines as those that are obviously inaccurate or are based on faulty logic. But Nussbaum argues that Rawls's theory is a moral and political account of society, and its definition of "unreasonable" also should be moral and political. For her, an unreasonable doctrine is one that rejects liberalism's moral premise that every citizen ought to be treated with equal respect. Thus, the state ought not condone "hate speech" that attacks the fundamental political rights of other groups in society, but everyone who respects the dignity of their fellow citizens should be free to develop, follow, and promote their own values—regardless of content—without discrimination or bias from the state.⁴¹ [End Page 68]

Library Neutrality and Political Liberalism

Political liberalism grounds the ideals assumed in the Library Bill of Rights in a broader theory of social justice. According to Rawls and Nussbaum, liberal neutrality is the best means of achieving the enlightened democratic society that libraries are designed to support according to Bivens-Tatum. Rawls's distinction between comprehensive moral systems and the more limited system of political justice provides deeper theoretical justification for Berninghausen's distinction between the private and the professional lives of librarians. In their private lives, librarians have the same rights as any other citizen to develop, support, and promote their own comprehensive conceptions of the good. In their professional lives, librarians who work as public officials have an obligation to treat all comprehensive doctrines with equal respect, including doctrines that they vigorously oppose in their private lives.

According to this view, the neutrality of the public library makes it especially valuable as a means of promoting self-development in politically liberal societies. Nussbaum argues that "real freedom to live according to one's own view also requires protecting the spaces in which people may leave one view and opt for another, and also the spaces in which children learn about options so that they can really live their own lives."⁴² It is hard to imagine spaces better suited to encouraging the exploration of options than public libraries. And it is hard to imagine a more important political responsibility for librarians than to "protect" those spaces by making sure that libraries continue to provide a wide diversity of views for citizens to explore.

This account addresses the primary criticisms of neutrality articulated in recent library discourse. Against the charge that neutrality protects the strong against the weak, the political liberal argues that the purpose of neutrality is precisely to protect the opinions of the minority against the tyranny of the majority. In a democratic society, the danger often is that the majority will use its influence to impose its comprehensive system of moral values on a minority. By protecting a space where all views receive equal respect—including those of the majority, the minority, the powerful, and the poor—the library can counterbalance the tendency to enforce conformity of opinion in democratic communities.

Of course, no library exists in the perfectly liberal society imagined by Rawls. Marred by persistent racism, sexism, and increasing economic inequality, twenty-first century America has not come close to achieving a political order in which every citizen receives equal respect. If librarians ignore these distressing realities and act as if our society has already achieved social justice, many of the inequities in the surrounding environment will be replicated within the library walls. Affirmative action within the library can mitigate the consequences of injustice outside the library while maintaining the ideal of neutrality between different conceptions of the good.⁴³ Librarians ought to seek out and collect [End Page 69] viewpoints infrequently expressed in the mass media because they are inconsistent with the interests of those who have money and power. Making sure that unpopular and unconventional opinions are available in the library and increasing their visibility is a useful means of countering biases of conventional wisdom. However, from the perspective of political liberalism, the goal always is to expand the diversity of options available to patrons rather than to direct them to conclusions that the librarian considers correct. For the library to emphasize specific doctrines—either minority or majority—because they are "right" would undermine the library's role as a space that treats everyone with equal respect and gives them the opportunity to explore differing options of the good.

Political liberalism also answers the charge that library neutrality is an ahistorical, apolitical myth. Because it grounds library values in the philosophical vision of the European Enlightenment and commits the library to the support of liberal democracy, this argument does not pretend that neutrality is a natural ideal that transcends politics. The library's neutrality is embedded in and limited by its political commitments. The library should not remain neutral when citizens, especially those who have power, refuse to play by the rules of political liberalism by using violence, threats, or intimidation to suppress the free expression of others. The library should, however, remain neutral between different conceptions of the good adopted by groups of citizens who are competing for political influence in democratic ways.

Liberal and Radical Critiques

Critics of the library neutrality syllogism fall into two camps, depending on which premise of the syllogism they challenge. Liberal critics accept the major premise that libraries are founded on Enlightenment ideals but reject the minor premise that liberal democratic institutions ought to be neutral. Radical critics reject the major premise that libraries ought to support Enlightenment values. They may agree with Bivens-Tatum's historical account, but they disagree with the claim that liberalism ought to guide librarianship in the future.