Code of Ethics 70th Anniversary

After hearing about Russian tanks ending the Prague Summer, Viktor Pestov decided he had to do something, so he talked his brother and a friend into becoming pamphleteers.

To keep from being caught by the police, they threw their pamphlets out of windows during parades. They crawled into the trolley yards at night and stuck their pamphlets to the roofs of trolleys, and, as the sun dried the mornig dew, the pamphlets flew off into the city streets. They used wet pieces of bread to stick the pamphlets to roofs; the pamphlets would float down to the streets after pigeons ate the bread.

After 20 months, Viktor was caught and sentenced to five years in a Gulag. He survived and, after Glasnost, the Gulag where he was imprisoned was turned into a museum. Today, Victor is on the board of that museum. He is also a librarian.

Viktor has what Code of Ethics 20th Anniversary speaker Rushwoth Kidder refers to as moral courage, a willingness to endure significant danger for the sake of principle.

It’s rare that librarians in this country are faced with dangerous situations, but we do face moral dilemmas, instances when two values we hold as right collide. When this occurs, we look to our Code of Ethics, one of the older professional ethical codes in this country. When challenged by competing values, we turn to to it to help us defend our belief in protecting privacy, our resistance to censorship, and our insistance on honesty. It’s what we’ve been doing since the the code was accepted 70 years ago today (though we revised it in 1981, 1995, and gave it a minor but important revision, regarding intellectual property, in 2008).

As Dr. Kidder pointed out, chocolate, libraries, and ethics are countercyclical. That is, we thrive when other elements of the economy are suffering. In his opinion, and I have no reason to doubt him because he knows far more about ethics than I do, people are coming to the library, especially right now, not just in search of free information, entertainment, or assistance finding jobs. They’re coming because we help to create a culture of integrity, a safe place for people to develop their moral compasses.

While I wouldn’t have thought to put it that way, that’s certainly one of the things that libraries gave me as a choild, and something they continue to offer me today. It’s nice to think they offer that to everyone and that everyone sees it as valuable, and so I do–that’s exactly what I think.