All through history, there has been a pervasive idea that knowledge can hurt you. We have treated knowledge of certain facts like a disease, something that can spread like the pox and disfigure for life. Withholding information need not be cynical manipulation. It is often well-intentioned. As a matter of personal hygiene, you keep the ones you love from filth, because you don't want to see them suffer.

The "bubble boy" is an extreme example in the medical world: born without a working immune system, he spent his life inside a sterile plastic bubble. Siddhartha Gautama, the later Buddha, was kept insulated from knowledge inside a pleasure garden for the first 29 years of his life.

The problem with this is that the bubble is as much a jail as a protective barrier. And if the patient/prisoner breaks out, he's totally unprepared for dealing with germs of knowledge. Faced with the sudden truth that people grow sick and old and ugly and dead, it is not so strange that Gautama concluded that life is suffering, and that the best thing to strive for is to escape from depressing cycle of rebirth.

Public health officials cannot keep individuals from disease, so their preferred solution is to try and keep germs from reaching the individuals. Censors try to quarantine knowledge as well, not to keep people stupid, but to protect the innocent. The patron saint of all book burners was someone called Solimon. I wish I knew more about his background, but all I can tell you is his verdict of books: "If a book says the same as the Koran, it is superfluous. If it says something else than the Koran, it lies."

Public health measures only work to the extent of our knowledge of diseases and how they spread. We can only hope that our officials will be able to tell bubonic plague from the common cold. We can only hope that they will not rely on witch burnings and shamanic rituals to keep us from falling ill.

There is reason to doubt our censors know enough about causes and effects of knowing. Should we keep the knowledge of how to make poison gas from spreading? Is it dangerous to show naked people in acts of love? Is it dangerous to show clothed people in acts of aggression? Will sex education lead to more promiscuity, to less venereal disease or both? So should we censor? And who should get to decide about what to censor?

Willfully exposing people to all kinds of diseases at once, "so they get used to it," would be tantamount to murder.

Reality can be similarly overwhelming. I could sit down with a very young person and tell her some things I know: God and Santa do not exist; known life is but a fly speck on the map of the universe; a hundred years from now we'll all be dead; there are people like Joseph Mengele, Stalin, Vlad the Impaler, and the Delhi sultans; all around you, and undetectable, are rapists, and molesters and loonies with guns, druggies, dealers, dunces and drunks; few people can resist taking advantage of a sucker; and that's not all, sweetheart.

If I were to do that, the child would probably become a very scared person, unable to trust anyone, quite willing to hide behind walls, shoot first and ask questions later. In fact, I know there are a lot of scared people like that: we call them "macho."

Rather than keeping knowledge away form people, I think we should prepare their minds to deal with it, the same way we prepare their bodies against killing diseases: by inoculating them when they are young, with carefully monitored doses of filth. That is no pleasure, neither for the giver nor for the receiver of painful knowledge. But it is more compassionate to rear people with little pock marks on their soul, people who can stand to know the truth, than to keep them untried, unblemished, dumb and happy. And fortunately for us, there is no knowledge so devastating that a mature human being cannot deal with it. Not that I know of, anyway.

--Anne Zeilstra