The row over the editorial vandalism of Roald Dahl’s children’s books to sanitise them for a modern audience and the outrageous fact that Penguin’s editors have attempted to “improve” the greatest prose writer in the English language, P.G. Wodehouse, have raised the debate temperature about words, wokeness and the culture war to yet another boiling point, provoking an unprecedented backlash. Is this the definitive turning point, where our shared, classically liberal values are reasserted, or will the more extreme versions of “woke” continue to triumph as long as we avoid a confrontation with the real culprit: Political Correctness?
Changes to literary works to “update” the language is nothing new. The term “bowdlerise” was born when Mr. Thomas Bowdler decided to shave off a bit of Shakespeare’s more fruity language in an 1818 edition of the Bard’s work, as Bowdler himself explained, “… nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” He clearly hadn’t met my family.
In 1939, Agatha Christie’s crime novel Ten Little Niggers were renamed for the American market to And Then There Were None, which also became the name of the subsequent film version. In Britain, the original title was printed until 1985(!). I have one of the offending articles in my bookshelf (hidden behind How To Be An Anti-Racist).
In 2011 the Guardian reported that Mark Twain’s work would be “cleaned up”, to stop his books being banned by schools. Twain himself, as is well known, was an active voice against racism who donated to civil rights organisations, and as Dr. Sarah Churchwell, senior lecturer in US literature and culture at the University of East Anglia, said at the time,
“The point of the book is that Huckleberry Finn starts out racist in a racist society, and stops being racist and leaves that society. These changes mean the book ceases to show the moral development of his character. They have no merit and are misleading to readers. The whole point of literature is to expose us to different ideas and different eras, and they won’t always be nice and benign. It’s dumbing down.”
Or said more simply: the educators are failing to educate. The word in this case was again “nigger” but also “injun” and other derogatory racial terms. But even in Scandinavia, thankfully lacking the particularly difficult historical context of the USA when it comes to race, books have been sanitised for modern sensitivities.
In 2006 the word “negerkonge” (negro king) was removed from Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking stories, and replaced with “Sydhavskonge” (King of the Southseas). Even the extremely popular TV-series from 1969 based on the stories was edited to remove the reference and also to cut out a scene where Pippi attempts to look Chinese by pulling her eyes back to make them more slanted.
So changes in literary texts have a long history and even Roald Dahl’s children’s stories have been changed before, indeed by the author himself. The original description of the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was as black pygmies from Africa and not only that but (which ought to upset the Right and the Left equally for different reasons) they were cheap foreign labour brought in to replace the English workers who were sacked. Faced with mounting pressure, Dahl eventually changed the description of the happy little workers to dwarfish hippies with long golden-brown hair and rosy-white skin. Important to note that this was the author himself making these changes in a way that he felt kept the integrity of the wider story and tone of the text.
What is particularly interesting about the recent controversy around Roald Dahl’s work is that the words that are being ripped out are so … well, non-offensive. They are adjectives such as “fat”, “ugly” and nouns such as “men”. It may not be polite to describe someone as “fat”, but if “fat” is to become unacceptable, we will have to yet again set to work with the scissors on naughty old Shakespeare, as he repeatedly used the adjective, for example in the Merry Wives of Windsor, “There was a fat woman with me.” Oh fye! And this they teach kids in schools?!
The reason Puffin gives for the changes in Dalh’s work is the need “… to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today“. This entails a massive assumption: that Mr. Dahl’s stories cannot be enjoyed by all today in their original form. Is that really true? And why should “all” enjoy them? Hardly any work of literature appeals to everyone.
The troubling thing as I see it, apart from going against Dahl’s expressed wishes, is that these publishers charged with looking after Dahl’s literary legacy seem to have completely missed the mark: one of the main reasons children (and some adults) like Mr. Dahl’s stories is that they are slightly subversive. They are naughty. Although good mostly triumphs over evil – children do like to see order and justice restored – there is something in Dahl’s writing that flies in the face of po-faced grown-up niceties; which is of course exactly what these changes are.
The truth is that these changes are not done for pragmatic reasons to make the text more accessible, such as regularising old-fashion spelling or inserting modern “translations”, as they do with Shakespeare for college students, but rather they are ideological: “people” substituted for “men”, for example; the addition of a sentence about how some women wear wigs for “other reasons” and how this is “perfectly fine” in The Witches; and removing references to Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad in Matilda and replacing them with Jane Austen and John Steinbeck. These types of changes do not make the books more accessible to a modern audience, but it does make them more ideologically aligned and certainly less Dahl-ish, which is actually pretty offensive, if you ask me.
These changes, along with the changes I mention further up, are the logical consequences of our old friend Political Correctness of which wokeness is only one expression. There has been an unprecedented backlash against these changes and the publishers have partially relented and said they will also publish a “classic” (i.e. uncensored) version alongside the bowdlerised new version.
But those who are only now waking up to what is going on, including authors rushing to get written guarantees from their publishers on how their legacy is to be dealt with, are rather late to the party. Nevertheless, they are welcome. But in order to combat the phenomenon that the Dahl-controversy is only one example of, and stop it happening in future, we need to tackle the root of the rot: Political Correctness.
The three basic components of Political Correctness
The assumption of guilt: One of the principles of political correctness (PC for short) is that it starts from an assumption of guilt. You may be familiar with the Anglican church’s general confession: “We have left undone those things we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.” (My bolding). PC is premissed on a secular notion of original sin being present in each and every one of us (implicit bias, toxic masculinity, heteronormitivity, etc.), and only by actively declaring your turning away from sin and conforming to the expressions of the politically correct creeds, can your assumed guilt be temporarily commuted.
The various Pride events in different countries in the summer of 2021 offered countless prime examples of the phenomenon I refer to; corporations and public bodies were falling over each other in the clamour to be the loudest declared gay-friend with flags, banners, posters, adverts and all kinds of public relation messaging to drive home the message: we are on-board, we have NOT left undone those things we ought to have done and we have NOT done those things which we ought not to have done, and we’re not guilty!
Of course, had this been in the least bit controversial, not a single major company would have done it. How many of these multinational banks declared their gay-friendliness in Muslim countries? PC means people and organisations do things, not from conviction, but to conform and express their lack of presumed guilt.
Ignorance of intention: In 2015, the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch used the phrase “coloured actors” in a discussion about the need to make sure non-white actors get the same opportunities that everyone else has and immediately faced a barrage of criticism (mostly online which was then picked up by real news outlets) for his use of this phrase. As a linguist, I feel duty-bound to point out that the clunky expression “actors of colour” is pretty much semantically identical to “coloured actors”, and so the difference is not in the meaning but in the expression being used as a signifier of membership of the correct tribe.
What’s crucial though, is that although some critics did acknowledge that Cumberbatch (probably) did have good intentions, they still found his use of the adjective+noun structure “offensive”, and so Mr. Cumberbatch issued the following statement: “I’m devastated to have caused offence by using this outmoded terminology. I offer my sincere apologies. I make no excuse for my being an idiot and know the damage is done.” He could have added There is no health in me.
Of course, the only “damage” was to his reputation among the “woke” PC tribe. Nobody else cared. No actual “damage” had been done to anyone and none had been intended – indeed, exactly the opposite had been intended, but the intention had been wilfully ignored. As with Mark Twain, the context and the intentions are disregarded in order to assert tribal purity or due to misguided safetyism, as discussed by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in the The Coddling of the American Mind.
Roland Barthes spoke of the Death of the Author – in the sense that meaning is always created afresh each time a text meets a reader – but Political Correctness, as expressed in the editing of Roald Dahl, P.G. Wodehouse, Twain and others, represent the Death of Context – an extraordinary ignorant and ignorant-making approach to “looking after” our literary heritage. Sensitivities change over time, if you’re unable to contextualise, you need to learn it. If not you remain less informed and enlightened than you might otherwise have been. Are we seeing what the philosopher Roger Scruton called the anti-Enlightenment at play here? Instead of educating our younger readers, we censor the texts to make them conform to orthodoxy.
Controlling the narrative: If your intentions and the context are immaterial and it’s only outward conformity that matters, then this gives an awful lot of power to those with the power to define what the correct outward show of orthodoxy is, to control and steer the narrative.
The criticism of Mr. Cumberbatch or the order to clean up Roald Dahl’s or P.G. Wodehouse’s work was not issued by a central authority of Political Correctness; there is no episcopal structure issuing edicts on the correct use of language, and talk of a conspiracy of the Woke Elites misses the point.
Instead I would point to what the German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neuman called a “spiral of silence”. The concept is discussed in Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Truth (reviewed here), and points to the fact that we all tend to have a strong conformity bias, “we harmonize our beliefs and even our perceptions with those of the people around us“, as Rauch puts it, and the more uniform and mono-cultural our environs are, the stronger the pull will be towards certain opinions becoming dominant. As Rauch explains:
“[…] a view which may initially not represent a consensus at all, which indeed is in the distinct minority, can make itself first seem dominant and then actually become dominant as holdouts fall silent, succumb to doubt, or convert to what they think is the prevalent view.” (P. 195).
So it’s not about a small cabal of powerful wokesters trying to control the rest of us, but rather that a narrow set of beliefs become dominant and take control of the discursive narrative, setting the parameter for “acceptable” speech and therefore “acceptable” thought because the gatekeepers dare not speak up or deviate.
The consequence of that is an intellectual and cultural impoverishment – as any mono-culture tends to lead to – but also an entrenchment of positions and a deeper and wider polarisation of society as people retract into their respective comfortable echo chambers where the circle of silence spirals into ever darker depths.
As John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty, “Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?” Substitute “politically incorrect or unwoke” for “irreligious or immoral” and it’s pretty much spot on 160 years later – Political Correctness has a massive opportunity cost.
What can be done (and why should we do it?)
What happened in the Dahl controversy was that the spiral of silence was interrupted by the sort of people whose opinion matters to the editors at Puffin. This is a crucial point. That some right-winger whines on about “political correctness gone mad” or “woke madness” or “free speech” has no traction whatsoever to break the spiral of the gatekeepers, indeed it rather contributes to strengthening it, as such people are already beyond the pale; the deplorables.
The spiral must be broken from within, which is why I believe it is so important that on the issue of classical liberal values, the bedrock of a free society, we must build a strong consensus across the left-right divide, and that includes a strong commitment by those on the left as well as those on the right to educate the younger generations in these values, why they matter and what that looks like in practice, for example tolerating opposing views and the rejection of compelled speech.
A good example of a spiral breaker is the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her excellent Reith Lecture on Freedom of Speech.
Why should we do it?
Anyone can get caught up the spiral of silence or intellectually sterile echo chambers, including right-wingers and churchgoers, but it matters much more when they are the gatekeepers of society’s wider discourse, i.e. newspaper editors, book editors (as we have seen), museum curators, journalists, senior academics, and those activists and students who have such people in their Twitter cross-hairs. The reason is obviously that although this is a very small proportion of society, they are disproportionately powerful when it comes to setting the tone and deciding what words and phrases that are to be used and which narratives are to be permitted.
And that matters because what words and phrases are permitted is important for delineating what thoughts are permitted. In his essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell writes, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought“. It is a theme he goes on to develop in his dystopic novel 1984 where the regime’s new version of English, Newspeak, is designed to make heretical thinking or Thoughtcrimes impossible. In an entertaining appendix to the novel, Orwell explained Newspeak more in depth:
“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words […] This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.” (Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Annotated Edition. Penguin Books Ltd. – my bolding).
An example of this happening today is the term “equity”, which suddenly seems to be everywhere; used by institutions and corporations as a matter of course, usually displacing the term “equality”. So what?
“Equality” is a nuanced term that can mean on the one hand equality of opportunity and before the law (which is broadly supported by some on the left and most on the right), and on the other hand equality of outcome (which is mainly supported by the left). Equality of outcome entails an active enforcement of some policy of distribution or even more controversially by what is often called “positive discrimination” (or “affirmative action” in the US).
“Equity”, on the other hand, as eminently explained in this PDF published by Marin County in California, can only mean equality of outcome:
“Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.”
Note how “equity” functions exactly as Orwell’s Newspeak intended: it precludes the undesirable concept of equality of opportunity and allows ONLY the concept of equality of outcome. Wrongthink becomes literally impossible if “equity” is the only acceptable term and “equality” goes out of usage (which it hasn’t quite done yet, I’m glad to say).
“But surely,” you may say, “it’s a good thing that we slowly and gradually make racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry or prejudice impossible by changes to the language?”
There are two problems with that: the narrowing of the field of “permitted thought” will not only expunge bad and horrible ideas, it will also inevitably disallow true and good ideas. We know that in recent years academics have held back from stating publicly what they know privately to be true, because the truth may be “unhelpful”, i.e. it goes against what is politically correct.
The second problem is that any attempt at limiting Wrongthink will for the most part only lead to surface conformity, not a genuine change of heart. Rauch makes the point that homosexuality has become accepted in Western societies, not because gay people was successful in censoring anti-gay sentiments or opinions being uttered, but because they took advantage of freedom of speech to argue, explain and show why same-sex attraction was something to be tolerated rather than feared. (P. 251).
“The biggest breakthrough for gay equality was not the Stonewall riot of 1969; it was the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1958, more than a decade earlier, that the government’s censorship of ONE [a gay magazine] was illegal. That decision gave Frank Kameny and other homosexuals the weapon they needed: their voice.“
At a time when being anti-gay was the political correct opinion, it was the assertion of a politically incorrect view that in the end changed minds and hearts, and in turn how people spoke about gay people.
The controlling of language may lead to an impoverishment of academia, high literature and culture, but it won’t change most people’s hearts and minds. True change requires understanding and understanding arises from conversations, debates and discussions in good faith (which is one reason why I am very enthusiastic about debating clubs and societies, such as the one I am involved with, called 104 London Debaters).
If all good people, left, right, centre, and all over the place, stand together against politically correct whitewashing of our language, a true and honest conversation may in time lead to real and positive change. Telling people what not to say, or indeed what to say, as in compelled speech – a step further into authoritarianism – is only likely to provoke even stronger resistance and entrenchment of views.
The concept of “whitewash”, incidentally, is from the Bible, where Jesus is reported to have given a broadside to the hypocritical elites of the day:
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” (Gospel according to St. Matthew, ch. XXIII, v. 27-28)
Let’s not be like the Pharisees; let’s reject Political Correctness and all its works!
M.W. Hagerup – Words Matter 