Open Writing

Once there was a brash young man named Herostratus who wanted fame more than anything, and he strove for notoriety by destroying the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World, on July 20, 346 B.C.

The temple was considered wonderful because of its symmetry and size, 425 feet long with 60 foot columns, more than twice as big as Athens’ Parthenon. Herostratus “proudly claimed credit,” according to Wikipedia, “in order to secure his place in history. To dissuade similar-minded fame-seekers, the authorities, as well as executing Herostratus, decided to condemn him to a legacy of obscurity by forbidding mention of his name under the penalty of death,”.

Herostratus probably didn’t count on the city fathers mandating his anonymity; it was an unintended consequence, like Shakespeare’s starlings. There’s a website, http://birdsofbard.blogspot.com, that describes all 600 bird species appearing in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It says that starlings, a nuisance bird native to Europe, appeared just once in the Bard’s oeuvre, in Act 1, Scene 3 of “Henry IV.” That’s all it took for the American Acclimatization Society to release 100 starlings in NY City’s Central Park 120 years ago as part of their plan to introduce all Shakespeare’s birds into North America.

The starlings loved our country, multiplying and spreading until they reached California in the 1950s. Today an estimated 200 million starlings live here causing millions of dollars in damage annually. The Washington Post reports that U.S. agents killed 1.7 million starlings last year, more than any other nuisance species, but “It’s sort of like bailing the ocean with a thimble,” according to retired Department of Agriculture researcher Richard Dolbeer. He specializes in forestalling starlings, which he called “flying bullets,” from hitting aircraft, but that’s not the limit of their destructiveness. Starlings also chase off native songbirds, disturb cattle operations, and have particularly corrosive droppings.

Chalk it up as an unintended consequences of literature. There are two types of unintended consequences: the positive kind, such as the serendipity of being delightfully surprised while aimlessly browsing the library’s shelves, which happens frequently. But the consequences can be negative. Sometimes known as “perverse incentives,” these negative consequences are both unintentional and undesirable for the person instigating the original action.

Examples of perverse consequences abound, from the Treaty of Versailles that concluded the War to End All Wars being so harshly constructed that it encouraged the formation of the German Third Reich and WWII, to introducing kudzu vines to combat soil erosion only to see them choke out many indigenous South Eastern U.S. plants. Don’t forget how the French colonialists tried to eradicate rats in Vietnam by paying farmers for rat skins only to discover that the Vietnamese were building rat farms to cash in. Or how European paleontologists paid Chinese peasants for dinosaur bone fragments and then learned that peasants were shattering the larger bones they found to produce more fragments.

Then there’s the “Streisand Effect,” which closely mirrors the unintended consequence of book banning. In 2003 singer Barbara Streisand sued a photographer to have his aerial photo of her property removed from his publicly-accessible website. His 12,000 photos of California coastline properties documented coastal erosion for the California Coastal Records Project, certainly a worthy endeavor, but Streisand felt it intruded on her privacy and sued him for $50 million. Consequently, 420,000 people viewed her property online in the next few weeks.

The same thing happens when well-meaning people object to books, movies, or art. Invariably, the law of perverse incentives kicks in. People suddenly feel compelled to see what the fuss is about and either borrow or buy copies to see for themselves. America’s public libraries are famous for presenting the best proponents of all points of view on major issues, so people can make up their own minds.

As Emily Dickinson wrote, and Herostratus in whatever anonymous circle of Hell he occupies would doubtlessly agree, “Fame is a fickle food/ Upon a shifting plate.”