THE OFFENDED NATION (PART II)
If most of the world has read George Orwell as a cautionary tale, our woke folk apparently read him as a how-to kit; hence the recent news that Puffin Books, with the assistance of “sensitivity readers,” redid the books of Roald Dahl to make them consistent with woke standards.
The publisher backtracked a bit in response to the subsequent backlash, but we should know by now that when it comes to matters woke, what was done to “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda” was just the first salvo.
By the very logic of the thing, there will be more and juicier targets, more demands for rewriting and more outright suppression because once you accept the premise that we should redo any cultural works that fail to measure up to the latest sensibilities, there can be no stopping point.
The point is that there is no point, given all the incentives for being offended, where we will all be able to say “enough, we’ve taken this too far.” Woke virtue-signaling virtually guarantees that however far matters have gone, there will always be someone wishing to demonstrate greater commitment to the cause by demanding to go further. Once the virtue bidding war begins, if Shakespeare then Dante, if Beethoven then Bach too, and if the Beatles, then certainly the Rolling Stones and Sex Pistols, and for that matter Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer.
It already makes for an interesting thought experiment to try to identify any movie or book from the past several decades that doesn’t have something in it that could conceivably offend someone somewhere.
If just about anything that has gone before, and so much of what surrounds us today, can be construed as imperfect and thus offensive by certain highly stringent standards, we arrive at the realization that the only “end” to it all will be the end of all culture. If woke standards are constantly evolving, what is rewritten today will have to be rewritten again tomorrow.
Ultimately, there would be no reason to settle for mere tinkering in the form of edits since, once the temptation to make over has been succumbed to, we could even alter plot lines and take out and/or add characters to books or movies to make them more “inclusive” and “look more like America.”
Bad Black characters could be simply deleted and replaced by (always) good and admirable Black characters, and (always good and admirable) transgender characters could be added to books and movies and operas which don’t have them, on the grounds that their absence “harms” and further “marginalizes” the LGBT+ community.
In the late, unlamented Soviet Union, Stalinist “socialist realism” dictated that all culture had to not only be vetted for (ideologically) offensive content but also contain themes that furthered the cause of building the earthly utopia. The narrow confines for artistic expression and subsequent chilling effect inevitably destroyed what had once been a flourishing Russian artistic and cultural scene.
That a different outcome would occur under woke totalitarianism than under Stalinist totalitarianism is far from evident, for it is the nature of totalitarianism per se that matters, not so much its particular ideological stuffing.
When it comes to art and culture, a little censorship is akin to being a little pregnant. Censorship is essentially an all-or-nothing binary proposition; once you begin, you can’t stop until you have gone all the way and thereby arrived at a place no sane person would choose as a destination.
So we either leave art and literature alone or we commence to light the bonfires.
Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville, Ark.