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2020-

2020-08-01 c
The Pervasive and Pernicious Thought Police

The New Puritans

Today’s cultural scolds demand that artists pass ideological and behavioral purity tests.

In October 2019, the Swedish Academy announced that it was awarding a Nobel Prize in Literature to Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke, a controversial figure owing to his apparent sympathy, expressed more than a decade earlier, for the late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević. The response from right-thinking members of the literary establishment was immediate opprobrium. In a statement by its president, Jennifer Egan, PEN America declared that it was “dumbfounded” by the news and “deeply regret[ted]” the Nobel committee’s choice. “We reject the decision that a writer who has persistently called into question thoroughly documented war crimes deserves to be celebrated for his ‘linguistic ingenuity,’ ” Egan said. “At a moment of rising nationalism, autocratic leadership, and widespread disinformation around the world, the literary community deserves better than this.”

The statement was noteworthy for its open disavowal of the primacy of art. The scare quotes around “linguistic ingenuity,” part of the Nobel citation for Handke, whom John Updike once called the finest writer in the German language, seem to cast doubt on the very concept, while the underlying presumption is that the artist’s moral turpitude necessarily inheres in his work. By celebrating Handke’s novels and plays, then, the Swedish Academy was giving succor to autocrats. Allied to this belief is Egan’s assertion that the literary world “deserves better”—meaning, one assumes, a Nobel laureate firmly planted on the right side of history. And if this overlooked paragon also possessed a fashionably marginal identity, so much the better. (Predictably, some critics complained that both the 2019 Nobel laureates in literature—the other being Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk—were white Europeans.)

Here we see the outlines of the new moralism that now obscures cultural creation in America, like a great Borgesian map settling oppressively over the territory it purports to describe. Its twin notions—that art and entertainment, as well as those who produce it, should be subject to ideological and behavioral purity tests; and that those cultural products and creators found wanting, deemed “problematic,” should be cast aside in favor of more edifying material—are in the ascendant, if not already dominant. The new illiberal moralism holds that preference should be given on class syllabuses, in review pages, and on short lists for major prizes to artists with whose politics the cultural arbiters agree and whose identities they can safely celebrate. The highest use of the arts, in this view, is to enshrine a vision of the world not as it is but as it should be, particularly in matters of racial and gender diversity and other cherished progressive causes. Books and films by problematic artists—and to be straight, white, and male is to be problematic thrice over—are at best unhelpful, at worst corrupting. As one writer told me, if you cut out the middle of Egan’s statement, it lays bare the problem with literature today: “We reject the decision that a writer . . . be celebrated for his linguistic ingenuity.” (read more)

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