Judge us on merit — not our colour or sexuality
On Sunday night, I tuned in to the antiques roadshow for my weekend fix of gentle eccentricity. Instead, I was subjected to a ‘ feminist special’, conceived to mark 100 years of votes for women.
In itself, it wasn’t such a bad idea — if only everyone hadn’t been so impossibly pleased with themselves.
a succession of worthy females interviewed another succession of worthy females about a variety of not terribly interesting but worthy subjects connected to the suffragette cause. It was the TV equivalent of a particularly tedious episode of radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
meanwhile, on Twitter, a small storm was raging over an article by the american author lionel Shriver accusing penguin random House of being ‘drunk on virtue’.
penguin has undertaken to ensure that by 2025 their author list will be inclusive of ethnic minorities, working- class people, those with disabilities and, of course, the everexpanding range of sexual proclivities operating under the lGBTQ etcetera banner.
The result, Shriver argued, was that a book ‘written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven’ would receive preferential treatment, regardless of ‘whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling’.
ultimately, she concluded, ‘penguin random House no longer regards the company’s
raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books’, putting box- ticking ahead of literary excellence.
as if that weren’t worrying enough, mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the national Education union, has attacked the school curriculum for being too focused on ‘dead white men’ such as Shakespeare, whom she described as an ‘ intensely conservative writer who wrote a lot of the time to bolster the divine right of kings’. To describe the Bard thus does make one wonder whether ms Bousted — who is also an English teacher — has ever actually read a word he wrote.
But that’s not the point. With her phrase ‘ drunk on virtue’, Shriver neatly and succinctly captures the prevailing mood of the moment.
a mood in which labels matter far more than substance and where success is not judged on talent, but by an ability to appease the right pressure groups.
and anyone who dares challenge this notion had better expect a kicking.
has now been dropped from the judging panel for a writing competition run by the women’s magazine mslexia, which accused her of alienating ‘ the very women we are trying to support’.
no doubt she will be replaced by some tiresome worthy, thus ensuring that the prize is won by someone suitably dull.
Because this is what happens when the virtue- signallers take over: originality of thought suffers.
Thus the exhibits selected for the female empowerment edition of antiques roadshow were not chosen for their intrinsic merits, but because of their right-on significance.
In the future, penguin will not be famous for publishing the best writing, but merely the most politically correct.
and children risk missing out on one of England’s greatest dramatists simply because he happens to be male and white.
of course, there are times when a little positive discrimination can help level an uneven playing field. But to see it in action on such an industrial scale — and in such vital arenas as literature, art and education — is totally chilling.
not just because it risks hollowing out our cultural heritage and censoring years of history, but also because it won’t achieve the desired effect.
a second-rate writer doesn’t suddenly become world- class just because their face happens to fit the prevailing social mood. Conversely, timeless talent can emanate from the most unlikely sources.
art should be judged blind. Caravaggio was a thief and a murderer, but it doesn’t make his painting any less sublime.
Wagner’s views on race were appalling, but his music is touched by genius. and are the films of Harvey Weinstein any less good (or bad) because of the sort of man he is? The answer, I’m afraid, is no.
The other thing I hate about all this is that it’s so incredibly patronising to those writers penguin will choose. like all-women shortlists in politics, it doesn’t help create a more equal society, it simply implies that if you are a woman, you are not good enough to make it without special pleading.
Ethnic minorities, workingclass people, those with disabilities, the lGBTQ community (to quote penguin) all deserve better. They should be judged on their merits, not their differences.
They should take their place in the pantheon of greats safe in the knowledge that they have every right to be there — not because they are part of some punch- drunk exercise in virtue-signalling.