In my last post I claimed there were two kinds of librarians–those who divide librarians into two kinds and those who don’t–and that I’m the former kind. Being a divider makes things easy, because once you start looking at the world in that simplistic way you see divisions everywhere. Science and religion, the personal and the political, Guelphs and Ghibellines, really whatever binary that pops into my head can provide useful fodder for false dichotomies, straw men, glittering generalities, oversimplification, question begging, non sequiturs, well poisoning, red herrings, weasel words, and other varieties of sophistry.

I’ve spent much of my adult life learning and teaching how to find, analyze, and evaluate evidence to support justified beliefs and reasoned arguments, and look where that’s gotten me. I’m neither a librarian rock star nor a prominent keynote speaker, so goodbye to all that. Divide and conquer is now my maxim.

On to the latest division. We can divide librarians into conservative librarians and liberal librarians.

Conservative librarians like the status quo, for better or worse. They don’t like change and they struggle against it. In discussions about change, they try to obfuscate the issues with irrelevant arguments, fallacious reasoning, and anything else they can do to draw attention away from existing problems and ways to solve them. If anyone thinks that maybe a current situation has a few problems and people should try to solve some of those problems, conservative librarians will resist them, sometimes by writing angry rants incoherently smearing their opponents and sometimes by writing cautious, overqualified essays subtly impugning the professionalism of those who disagree with them.

Conservative librarians have no positive goals. Their goals are entirely negative. First, stop any changes to the status quo. Second, stop conversations about changing the status quo, and if that’s not possible then obscure or derail the conversations. They will never come out and just say, “I like the status quo and I don’t want it to change no matter what and I wish you’d just shut up.” And they resent being called conservative and will deny it vehemently, because if it’s acknowledged that they’re conservatives opposed to all change regardless of its merits, then their arguments, such as they are, will be immediately ignored by most people.

On the other side, we have liberal librarians. Liberal librarians are more open to change because they’re smart, fun loving, and easygoing. The status quo doesn’t provide them with any particular comfort and they don’t fear the possibility that things might change if it means improvement. They don’t want chaos, but they don’t mind experimentation and gradual progress. They like freedom of discussion not only for themselves but for other people. They don’t try to shut down or obscure conversations. Quite the opposite. If liberal librarians have any flaw, it’s that they tend to discuss things to death. They’re open-minded and perhaps a tad too idealistic. Sometimes they dream too big, but they believe that while utopias don’t exist they still provide motivation to make a better world than we have now.

Liberal librarians like to take what they find and leave it better than they found it. Conservative librarians find this disconcerting because they always prefer what they have to what might be better, because even if the end result is better, the process of change is always bad. When liberal librarians talk about possibilities for improvement, conservative librarians focus on negative unintended consequences. When liberal librarians describe better ways of doing some things, conservative librarians will claim that any small improvements won’t make any real difference anyway so it’s pointless to try. When liberal librarians say they want freedom, conservative librarians will label that freedom tyranny.

There’s nothing either good or bad about conservative or liberal librarians. I’m not criticizing either one or implying that one of these is better than the other. Libraries need both. They need reactionaries who oppose all change and visionaries who can imagine better futures and how we might achieve them. Both are equally good. But it’s crucial that we divide librarians into these suspect categories so that we can discuss which kind of librarian we are or how I’ve misconstrued one side or the other or how maybe I’m just spouting nonsense. Otherwise, we might talk about something important.