Greg Sheridan on Cancel Culture By James Reed
Strange times, indeed. I never thought that I would find myself agreeing with Greg Sheridan. Back in the day I used to buy The Australian to write a critique of his material every week. But now I agree with him on cultural issues, more often than not. He is dismayed at the dangers of cancel culture, which is working its way through the Western canon, as thoroughly as any poison, but no poison is as toxic, and deadly as left-wing wokeism. Better to drink pure plutonium.
“The idea of rewriting classics to make them conform to the prejudices of today is so spectacularly dumb, so epic in its nuttiness, so complete a form of cultural madness, that it illustrates perfectly George Orwell’s observation that to believe certain things you have to be an intellectual, no normal man could be so stupid.
Even Shakespeare productions have been bowdlerised to avoid offensive words and ideas. Yet The Merchant of Venice was in part about anti-Semitism, race relations are the backdrop of Othello and don’t even begin on the countless ways The Taming of the Shrew offends contemporary sensibilities.
But Shakespeare was the supreme genius of human literature.
Are we really so deranged we would censor his words from 400 years ago so we don’t have to endure insights from the past? Are our insights today simultaneously sublimely perfect, and incapable of withstanding exposure to anything different?
Like many others I was most enraged at the ridiculous practice of the publisher in censoring and rewriting Enid Blyton’s books. Primary school children today have to put up with gender fluidity training, if their parents get pay TV they can turn on Game of Thrones and watch endless debauchery and violence, but we protect them from such shocking Blyton dialogue as “Shut up” or “Don’t be an ass!”
The very appeal of reading something from the past is that it’s different from where you are now. Very early in life I discovered that books can take you anywhere in the world, not only anywhere now but anywhere in history, and, given the power of the human imagination, to many places that don’t even really exist. Now we want to cancel literature’s magical visa.”
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