Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I’m not a huge fan of The New Yorker or its editor David Remnick, and eventually I let my subscription lapse. That had its bad side, for there are lots of good articles in the magazine. I just didn’t like the political tenor, and, importantly, I couldn’t keep up with the many issues.
Here’s an article someone sent me from the magazine, and it’s by David Remnick. It’s actually the best career/literary summary of Rusdhie, as well as of the recent (and near fatal) attack on him that I’ve seen. It’s not paywalled, and if you’re a Rushdie fan, or have been following his career since the fatwa, I recommend it highly. Click on the screenshot to read it:
(From NYer): Photograph by Richard Burbridge for The New Yorker
I first heard of Rushdie at the beginning of a month-long trip to India, when I scoured the used-book sellers around the cinema in Connaught Circus in Delhi, looking for some reading material to take along. I found a novel called Midnight’s Children, knew nothing about it except that it looked interesting, and bought it. I was mesmerized—transported into another world. (It of course won the Booker Prize, and then the “Booker of Booker”: the best of the Booker Prize winners, but I didn’t know about the Prize.) Since that time I’ve been a fan.
When attacked in New York state, Rushdie was on a book tour promoting his newest novel, Victory City (Remnick lauds the book). That’s the book he refers to in the bit below, and I’m glad (but not surprised) to see that Rushdie still has his sense of humor.
“I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim,” he said. “Then you’re just sitting there saying, Somebody stuck a knife in me! Poor me. . . . Which I do sometimes think.” He laughed. “It hurts. But what I don’t think is: That’s what I want people reading the book to think. I want them to be captured by the tale, to be carried away.”
Many years ago, he recalled, there were people who seemed to grow tired of his persistent existence. “People didn’t like it. Because I should have died. Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me. . . . That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.”
Lagniappe: Read this extract from Rushdie’s essay “Imagine No Heaven“, which is free online at the Guardian. It appeared in longer form (and under the title under the title “‘Imagine There’s no Heaven’: A Letter to the Six Billionth World Citizen”) in Hitchens’s collection of writing about atheism, The Portable Atheist.
We should have all learned by now that psychological research shows that trigger warnings do not do what they were intended to do:—protect the mental health of people with PTSD. In fact, as the article in Persuasion below reiterates, they simply keep people traumatized. Or they could even increase trauma.
To the contrary, psychologists and therapists recommend that controlled exposure to a traumatic subject is the way to help cure people of extreme PTSD.
Amna Khalid, who wrote the article at hand, is an Associate Professor of history at Carleton College and has a Substack site, Banished. Her piece below includes links to the data about the ineffectiveness of trigger warnings, so remember to cite these data when people are arguing for trigger warnings.
(You may remember that Khalid, a Muslim, wrote a strong piece in the Chronicles of Higher Education criticizing the dismissal of an instructor at Hamline University for showing an ancient painting of Muhammad that depicted his face. And that instructor even issued several trigger warnings.)
Click below to read Khalid’s piece; its thesis is summarized in the title:
Let me say that, presumably like Khalid, I’m not opposed to every single “content warning”, as they’re now called. If I’m going to post a video that has gruesome stuff in it that might revolt a lot of people, like beheadings, dead bodies, and the like, I will warn people, for a lot of people prefer to avoid such images. They don’t have PTSD or phobias, but find some stuff pretty revolting. The kind of trigger warning that both Khalid and I oppose are those that single out stuff that most people wouldn’t find offensive at all, or that might turn them away from something they need to see or hear, especially in art or literature. One example is putting trigger warnings on books because they contain the n-word, or have violence in them, or depict any aspect of life that at least one reader would find offensive.
I’ve divided her piece into three parts (this is my own take, and I’ve put headings in bold. For each I’ll give an indented quote from her article.
a.) The inanity of many trigger warnings.
Just days into the new year, Scottish papers reported that the University of Aberdeen had slapped a trigger warning on J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a classic children’s novel about a place where nobody ever grows up. The reason: the book’s “odd perspectives on gender” may prove “emotionally challenging” to some adult undergraduates, even though it contains “no objectionable material.”
Yes, you read that right—a children’s book now comes with a trigger warning for adults. What’s more, Peter Pan is not the only children’s book to come with an advisory at Aberdeen. Among others are Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children and C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Last year the university put a trigger warning on Beowulf, the epic poem considered one of the most significant works in the English literary canon, for its depictions of “animal cruelty” and “ableism.” The year before that, the university pushed lecturers to issue content warnings for a long list of topics including abortion, miscarriage, childbirth, depictions of poverty, classism, blasphemy, adultery, blood, alcohol and drug abuse.
Aberdeen is not the only British university following in the steps of American counterparts. The University of Derby issued trigger warnings for Greek tragedies. The University of Warwick put a content advisory on Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd for “rather upsetting scenes concerning the cruelty of nature and the rural life.” At the University of Greenwich, the death of an albatross in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 18th century poem, was deemed “potentially upsetting” and stuck with a content notice.
You can see that a trigger warning for the albatross in Coleridge’s poetry is simply too extreme, treating students as if the description of a dead bird would shatter their world.
b.) The futility of trigger warnings. I once met a guy who was a specialist in therapy for people with phobias or extreme anxieties. As I have a couple of friends who are really afraid of flying (something I don’t understand, as it’s safer than driving)—one of whom was my late Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin—I asked the therapist how he helped people overcome this. He said “We go as a group on a couple of flights to Milwaukee, turn around, and immediately fly back again.” He said it was okay to admit your fears to yourself, but you have to act against them. Same for those afraid of elevators. Controlled exposure to these things was the key to getting over them. But I digress; here’s Khalid’s summary of the data:
This trend is alarming for several reasons. First, it runs counter to research on the effects of such advisories. As early as 2020 the consensus, based on 17 studies using a range of media, was that trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress, and they do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts. Notably, these advisories, which were at least initially introduced out of consideration for people suffering from PTSD, “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas.”
On the contrary, researchers found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD, prompting them to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” A recent meta-analysis of such warnings found the same thing: the only reliable effect was that people felt more anxious after receiving the warning. The researchers concluded that these warnings “are fruitless,” and “trigger warnings should not be used as a mental health tool.”
c.) The counterproductive nature of trigger warnings. Khalid’s view, with which I agree, is that “there is something particularly perverse about appending [trigger warnings] to works of literature and art.” It treats the students like fragile infants, and in fact could make them more traumatized (or fragile) by somehow validating their emotional responses. I would give a content warning to students were I to show a movie of lions taking down a zebra, but would not if I were teaching The Great Gatsby (“trigger warning: death, spousal abuse, adultery, religious stereotypes”).
Khalid:
In other words, literature is transformative precisely because it has the ability to shock and surprise. It can jolt us out of complacency, force us to contend with the uncertain, the strange and even the ugly. For Franz Kafka, the only books worth reading are the ones that “wound or stab us.” He observed:
If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?… we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like suicide. A book must be an ax for the frozen sea inside us…
Contending with “the frozen sea” opens the door for the kind of contemplation that is necessary for growth. When a classic such as Beowulf comes with “animal cruelty” and “ableism” on the cover, a piece of literature that offers us a unique window into the traditions and values of medieval Anglo-Saxons is devalued, and simply becomes a text riddled with “problematic” themes.
I read Beowulf in the original (I took a year of Old English in college), and I don’t remember “animal cruelty” beyond the death of Grendel, a fictitious monster, nor any “ableism” at all. But back to Khalid:
I can’t help but think that something is broken when universities, the very institutions entrusted with helping young minds mature, infantilize students by treating them as fragile creatures. What accounts for this shift?
Students across Britain seem to be in favor of trigger warnings. According to a survey published by the Higher Education Policy Institute last year, 86% of students support trigger warnings (up from 68% in 2016). More than a third think instructors should be fired if they “teach material that heavily offends some students” (up from just 15% in 2016).
Sadly, it appears that universities in Britain have fallen prey to the kind of corporate logic that is already firmly entrenched in the United States. This growing managerial approach with its customer-is-always-right imperative is increasingly evident in university policies.
. . .But university is not a television or radio show. Far from it. It’s a place where students come for an education. A model where faculty and administrators pander to student sensitivities—to the extent that it starts undermining the mission of the university—would be comical were it not so serious. If we fail to equip our students with the skills and sensibilities necessary to cope with life, we are doing them a great disservice.
When adult university students ask for trigger warnings for children’s literature, we as a society should realize that somewhere along the line, we lost the plot. Instead of coddling our students we should be asking why they feel so emotionally brittle. Might it be that their fragility is the result of limited exposure to what constitutes the human condition and the range of human experience? Is shielding them and managing their experience of art and literature not just exacerbating their sense of vulnerability?
Perhaps, in the end, what they need is unmediated, warning-free immersion in more literature, not less.
I know that some schools actually require trigger warnings on syllabi. Mine doesn’t, thank Ceiling Cat, so you’ll never get into trouble here if a student runs crying to the administration that you didn’t warn him about the albatross.
Anybody who defends J. K. Rowling against the mob’s assertion that she’s a “transphobe” will get lots of flak, and I’m no exception. (I get the most private attacks on two issues: my atheism and my writings about transgender and transsexual issues.)
I’ve followed Rowling’s saga from the beginning, and have read her supposedly “transphobic” tweets and her account of “reasons for speaking out on sex and gender issues.” I’ve also seen the social-media mob go after her to the extent of some of the offended burning Harry Potter books! And it won’t be news to you that in this issue I’m pretty much on Rowling’s side.
I have seen nothing “transphobic” from her: no hatred of trans people at all. What she’s demonized for is insisting that transsexual women, while deserving of the compassion that should accrue to all humans, are not identical in every respect to biological women. She does not agree in the literal sense with the mantra “trans women are women”, and has explained why. She is navigating a tortuous path between the rights of biological women and those of transsexual women, and has been attacked because she sometimes uses sarcasm and humor to make her point.
But one thing I haven’t seen in her is a fear or hatred of transsexual people. What I have seen are bravery, persistence and compassion in the face of “Rowlingphobia” (now she’s being called a “Nazi”), but also her fierce conviction that some trans activists are trying to infringe on the rights of biological women, rights that are not 100% in synch with the rights of transsexual women.
I digress, but It would be craven of me to call your attention to Pamela Paul’s new defense of Rowling without giving my own views.
You can read Paul’s NYT column on the site (click headline below), but if you don’t have a subscription, you can find the piece free on The Wayback Machine, an internet archive. You can go to that site, put in the URL of the article you’re looking for in the box at the top of the page, and see if anybody has archived it. If they have, you can read it by clicking on one of the dates and any of the links that come up. Paul’s article, for example is archived here. As always, I urge you to use the “pay” option if you read something like the NYT often (I subscribe).
I wrote what’s above before I read Paul’s piece beyond the title, but I see that she says pretty much what I did, though of course more eloquently and thoroughly. Let me give one one longish excerpt from Paul’s piece. (Those who demonize her, of course, will accept no evidence that she’s not a “transphobe”.) Note, too, there’s about to be a podcast about Rowling and this controversy. While it features Rowling herself, along with her friends and foes, I think, judging by what Paul says (she’s heard it), that it leaves the listener sympathetic to Rowling.
Paul (her words are indented; mine flush left):
“Trans people need and deserve protection.”
“I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others but are vulnerable.”
“I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.”
“I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.”
These statements werewritten by J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series, a human-rights activist and — according to a noisy fringe of the internet and a number of powerful transgender rights activists and L.G.B.T.Q. lobbying groups — a transphobe.
Even many of Rowling’s devoted fans have made this accusation. In 2020, The Leaky Cauldron, one of the biggest “Harry Potter” fan sites, claimed that Rowling had endorsed “harmful and disproven beliefs about what it means to be a transgender person,” letting members know it would avoid featuring quotes from and photos of the author.
Other critics have advocated that bookstores pull her books from the shelves, and some bookstores have done so. She has also been subjected to verbal abuse, doxxing and threats of sexual and other physical violence, including death threats.
Now,in rare and wide-ranging interviews for the podcast series “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” which begins next week, Rowling is sharing her experiences. “I have had direct threats of violence, and I have had people coming to my house where my kids live, and I’ve had my address posted online,” she says in one of the interviews. “I’ve had what the police, anyway, would regard as credible threats.”
This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.
So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think.
The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.
You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.
But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.
Paul (who used to be the NYT Sunday Book Review editor) has gone way further than I: she’s read every book Rowling has written (I read only the first Harry Potter book), including her crime novels written under a pseudonym. If you’ve followed this fracas, you’ll know that the people looking to be offende find “transphobic” stuff in all her books. And Paul reminds us that even before gender activists went after Rowling, the Harry Potter series was widely attacked and even banned by religious people horriied by her depiction of magic and witchcraft.
Paul has listened to the podcast series, which begins next Tuesday (Feb. 21), and you can sign up here. It’s more than just Rowling discussing her views, but includes interviews with both supporters and critics of the author. Clearly nothing in the podcast convinced Paul that Rowling is hateful or a transphobe. In fact, the host of the podcast is Megan Phelps-Roper, described as “a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church and the author of ‘Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism.’ Phelps-Roper adds that “she appreciated the novels as a child but, raised in a family notorious for its extremism and bigotry, she was taught to believe Rowling was going to hell over her support for gay rights.” Clearly she’s had a change of heart, and now sees Rowling as someone who, though “privileged”, is using her voice to speak up for those who have been cowed or bullied into silence.
Finally, Paul notes that the tide may be turning: actors in the Potter movies who once were silent have sprung to her defense, and journalists are starting to support her. Here’s are two tweets from Caitlan Flanagan of The Atlantic:
An article that tries to damn @jk_rowling with her own quotes.
There is nothing hateful.
Eventually, she will be proven right, and the high cost she's paid for sticking to her beliefs will be seen as the choice of a principled person.https://t.co/52TrT1jxM0
Paul ends this way, having noted that Rowling herself says that bullying and authoritarianism is a trope in many of her own books:
Rowling could have just stayed in bed. She could have taken refuge in her wealth and fandom. In her “Harry Potter” universe, heroes are marked by courage and compassion. Her best characters learn to stand up to bullies and expose false accusations. And that even when it seems the world is set against you, you have to stand firm in your core beliefs in what’s right.
Defending those who have been scorned isn’t easy, especially for young people. It’s scary to stand up to bullies, as any “Harry Potter” reader knows. Let the grown-ups in the room lead the way. If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights. They’d also be standing up for the truth.
Them’s strong words in the NYT. I advise you to follow Paul’s columns by subscribing to them. Her critique of “progressivism” is refreshing, and perhaps portends a new openness in the NYT. Along with John McWhorter, she’s one of the new antiwoke but liberal columnists who have a regular gig at the paper.
The 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to French writer (and literature professor) Annie Ernaux, already laden with awards. I’d never heard of her, and those who informed me of this award hadn’t, either. I wondered if her books haven’t been translated into English, but it turns out that many of them have been, including The Years, mentioned by the NYT below.
Nobody guessed her in our October 4 contest, so the losing streak there continues, despite people being asked to guess just one winner. Many guessed Salman Rushdie, and I agree that he deserves a Nobel, but the Committee surely knows what would happen if he was given that prize. But if that’s the reason he hasn’t won, they are cowards.
At any rate, it’s time for you literature mavens to give Ernaux a try.
Here’s the announcement from the Swedish Academy (click to read):
The citation and press releases are very short, saying just this:
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022 is awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.
In her writing, Ernaux consistently and from different angles, examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class. Her path to authorship was long and arduous.
I presume the video below will tell you more as does this NYT article (click to read):
The announcement was made with her having heard of it! From the NYT:
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Annie Ernaux, the French novelist whose intensely personal books have spoken to generations of women by highlighting incidents from her own life, including a back-street abortion in the 1960s and a passionate extramarital affair.
Mats Malm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which that decides the prize, announced the decision at a news conference in Stockholm, lauding the “courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”
The committee had not been able to reach Ernaux by telephone, Malm said, but he expected her to “soon be aware of the news.” They intended to present her with the prize on Dec. 10.
Ernaux, 82, becomes only the 17th female writer to have won the prize, widely considered the most prestigious award in world literature, since it was formed in 1901. She is the second woman to be given the prize in three years after Louise Glück, who was awarded the 2020 prize for writing “that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
. . . Outside France, she is perhaps best known for “The Years,” which weaves together events from over 70 years of Ernaux’s life with French history. In 2019, “The Years” was shortlisted for the Booker International Prize, a major British award for fiction translated into English.
I’ve put up the words of Thomas Wolfe several times on October 1 (he was born on October 3, 1900 and died of tuberculosis at just 37). This is a repost from exactly two years ago. The prose is gorgeous and evocative, and of course appropriate to the day.
*********
No writer has captured the color and feel of America better than Thomas Wolfe. From Of Time and the River:
Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big that you cannot say that the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails, just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up; the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling upon you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun so that you cannot say that sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground, and where the leaves. . .
October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.
The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania, and the big stained teeth of crunching horses. The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards, the barn is sweet with hay and leather, wood and apples—this, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth is all: the sweat, the labor, and the plow is over. The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf, smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters; the pantry shelves are loaded with 300 jars of fruit. Meanwhile the leaves are turning, turning up in Maine, the chestnut burrs plop thickly to the earth in gusts of wind, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.
This is what we were all afraid of. It’s been 33 years since the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, but the rancor remains. He’s had a bodyguard, I think, but somehow the protection was bypassed. An AP report gives sketchy details about his attack in New York. It sounds serious, and the other photos at the AP are not heartening.
Some of the article:
Salman Rushdie, the author whose writing led to death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was attacked Friday as he was about to give a lecture in western New York.
An Associated Press reporter witnessed a man storm the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and begin punching or stabbing Rushdie as he was being introduced. The 75-year-old author was pushed or fell to the floor, and the man was restrained.
Rushdie was quickly surrounded by a small group of people who held up his legs, presumably to send more blood to his chest.
His condition was not immediately known.
Hundreds of people in the audience gasped at the sight of the attack and were then evacuated.
Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses” has been banned in Iran since 1988, as many Muslims consider it to be blasphemous. A year later, Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.
A bounty of over $3 million has also been offered for anyone who kills Rushdie.
Iran’s government has long since distanced itself from Khomeini’s decree, but anti-Rushdie sentiment has lingered. In 2012, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation raised the bounty for Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.
Rushdie dismissed that threat at the time, saying there was “no evidence” of people being interested in the reward.
That year, Rushdie published a memoir, “Joseph Anton,” about the fatwa. The title came from the pseudonym Rushdie had used while in hiding.
Here’s a photo. We don’t know who the perpetrator was, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I’m hoping hard that he’ll survive.
(From AP): Author Salman Rushdie is tended to after he was attacked during a lecture, Friday, Aug. 12, 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, N.Y., about 75 miles (120 km) south of Buffalo. (AP Photo/Joshua Goodman)
Today we’ll have two posts on how the “Elect”—et’s use that instead of “woke”, so as to conform to John McWhorter’s supposedly non-pejorative word—are changing or banning art to both confirm virtue and prevent others from enjoying good painting, dance, and writing. One source will be the liberal media; the other the conservative media. This first post deals mainly with literature, but I’ve put some “racialization of art” stuff at the very bottom.
Let’s start with the liberal media, which of course reports Elect shenanigans less often than does the liberal “MSM”. In this case, however, the Guardian is the source. This concerns Art Spiegelman’s “graphic novel” Maus, which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature (the “Special Awards and Letters” category) in 1986.
Before I first read Maus, I was disdainful of “graphic novels,” thinking they were just comic books for adults, made for people who wanted to look at pictures rather than read.
Was I wrong! I first saw Maus at the 57th Street Bookstore soon after I arrived in Chicago, and, knowing the plaudits it got, I pulled it off the shelf. I started reading, and then couldn’t stop. The artwork, I found, added immensely to the power of the book, especially the depiction of all characters as animals, though one wouldn’t expect that power in a book about the Holocaust. I bought it, which I rarely do with books due to my groaning shelves, and it’s now one of several graphic novels I own. (The other two are volumes of wonderful series The Rabbi’s Cat, given to me by a friend.) It’s not just that the books have moggies in them; the attraction is, as in Animal Farm, that messages can be driven home more deeply using animals as metaphors than by straight depiction of human actions.
At any rate, everyone should read Maus (and I also recommend The Rabbi’s Cat). But, according to the Guardian the good (?) people on a Tennessee school board have taken it upon themselves to deprive students of this access—for no good reason.
Click on the screenshot below to read the piece. You know it’s gotta be egregious censorship if the woke Guardian reports it!
Why did the school board, which after deciding to redact the book, find it more practical to ban it outright? Because there was a single depiction of nudity OF A MOUSE and a few swear words that kids hear (and use) every day. An excerpt from the article (my emphasis):
A Tennessee school board has banned a Pulitzer prize-winning novel from its classrooms over eight curse words and an illustration of a naked cartoon mouse.
The graphic novel, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by New Yorker Art Spiegelman, uses hand-drawn illustrations of mice and cats to depict how the author’s parents survived Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
The graphic memoir elevated a pulp mass medium to high art when it nabbed a slew of literary awards in 1992 but appears not to have impressed educators in Mcminn county.
Ten board members unanimously agreed in favour of removing the novel from the eighth-grade curriculum, citing its use of the phrase “God Damn” and drawings of “naked pictures” of women, according to minutes taken from a board of education meeting earlier this month.
Here’s the only passage about nudity (OF A MOUSE) in the school board minutes (have a look at the link above):
Mike Cochran- I will start. I went to school here thirteen years. I learned math, English, Reading and History. I never had a book with a naked picture in it, never had one with foul language. In third grade I had one of my classmates come up to me and say hey what’s this word? I sounded it out and it was “damn,” and I was real proud of myself because I sounded it out. She ran straight to the teacher and told her I was cussing. Besides that one book which I think she brought from home, now I’ve seen a cuss word in a textbook at school. So, this idea that we have to have this kind of material in the class in order to teach history, I don’t buy it.
. . .We are talking about teaching ethics to our kids, and it starts out with the dad and the son talking about when the dad lost his virginity. It wasn’t explicit but it was in there. You see the naked pictures, you see the razor, the blade where the mom is cutting herself. You see her laying in a pool of her own blood. You have all this stuff in here, again, reading this to myself it was a decent book until the end. I thought the end was stupid to be honest with you. A lot of the cussing had to do with the son cussing out the father, so I don’t really know how that teaches our kids any kind of ethical stuff. It’s just the opposite, instead of treating his father with some kind of respect, he treated his father like he was the victim.
We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history. We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history. We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.
At least Mickey Mouse had the decency to cover his shame with pants!
At first they thought about just redacting the panels with nudity and cussing, but that would lead to copyright violations:
“There is some rough, objectionable language in this book,” director of school, Lee Parkison, is recorded as saying in the session’s opening remarks.
Parkison continued to say he had “consulted with our attorney” and as a result “we decided the best way to fix or handle the language in this book was to redact it … to get rid of the eight curse words and the picture of the woman that was objected to.”
Board member Tony Allman supported the move to remove the “vulgar and inappropriate” content, arguing: “We don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff.”
. . . After much discussion over the redaction of words the members found objectionable, the board eventually decided that alongside copyright concerns, it would be better to ban the graphic novel altogether.
Eventually they voted to entirely remove the book from the eight-grade curriculum. Those kids are about fourteen years old, and you tell me that none of them has seen a drawing or photo of a naked woman before, or heard (much less used) the words “God damn”.
But apparently the use of animals was said to”brutalize the Holocaust”, as if it wasn’t sufficiently brutal. Indeed, to bring home the nature of the Holocaust, pictures (either photos or artwork) are essential; words alone are insufficient:
Board member Tony Allman supported the move to remove the “vulgar and inappropriate” content, arguing: “We don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff.”
“I am not denying it was horrible, brutal, and cruel,” Allman said in reference to the genocide and murder of six million European Jews during the second world war.
“It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy,” he added.
Allman also took aim at Spiegelman himself, alleging: “I may be wrong, but this guy that created the artwork used to do the graphics for Playboy.”
“You can look at his history, and we’re letting him do graphics in books for students in elementary school. If I had a child in the eighth grade, this ain’t happening. If I had to move him out and homeschool him or put him somewhere else, this is not happening.”
Mike Cochran, another school board member, described parts of the book as “completely unnecessary”.
“We are talking about teaching ethics to our kids, and it starts out with the dad and the son talking about when the dad lost his virginity. It wasn’t explicit but it was in there,” Cochran said.
“We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history. We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history. We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”
Here we have a bunch of Pecksniffian parents making the decision that fourteen-year-olds shouldn’t have access to a famous, powerful, and moving graphic novel.
Spiegelman’s reaction:
Spiegelman said he was “baffled” by the outcome in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday. “It’s leaving me with my jaw open, like, ‘What?’” the 73-year-old author said, adding he thought the school board was “Orwellian” for approving the ban.
Spiegelman’s Jewish parents were both sent to Nazi concentration camps and his mother took her own life when he was just 20.
“I’ve met so many young people who … have learned things from my book,” Spiegelman said. “I also understand that Tennessee is obviously demented. There’s something going on very, very haywire there.”
Well of course not all of Tennessee is demented, but there are some school board members who are acting, well, I won’t give my reaction. Let’s just say it’s similar to Neil Gaiman’s:
There's only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days. https://t.co/fs1Jl62Qd8
I don’t know where else to put this item, but it appears that Wokeness Electness has invaded the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I don’t know how far the rot has spread, but readers might check for themselves. We know, at least, that David and Canova, were racists. They could at least have depicted Socrates as a person of color!
When the “Black Lives Matter” slogan was coopted for other purposes—like the “Blue Lives Matter” slogan lauding police or the “All Lives Matter” slogan meant to denigrate its model—the mimic phrases were rightly condemned as “whataboutery.” By using the original words, the other slogans subtly mocked or even repudiated the slogan—and thus the goal—of Black Lives Matter.
This goes for other forms of ideological and moral statements. When one condemns, for example, attacks on Asians, as happened during and after the Florida Spa massacre (not definitely targeted at Asians) and during the pandemic, you should defend the rights of Asians to live in America without fear, and should condemn attacks on Asians motivated by bigotry. To lump in all other minorities at the same time dilutes the solidarity one expresses with a beleaguered group, and thus what solace the group can take. (If you want to condemn all bigotry, then just say that, but it confers more love to defend a specific group under attack rather than just saying, “Can’t we just love one another?”)
This holds for all beleaguered minorities except one. And you know which one that is: the Jews. Although they’re the most frequent victims of hate crimes in the U.S. on a per capita basis, Jews though a tiny minority, are not considered minorities and are not considered oppressed—despite the data I just gave and the increasing tendency of the American Left to tilt towards anti-Israel sentiments and, indeed, anti-Semitic movements like BDS. Lest you fault me for going off on anti-Semitism again, be aware that this is one of the biggest hypocrisies of the Western Left, right up there with the Left’s failure to defend the rights of gays and women that are regularly abrogated in Arab countries. After all, Arabs are considered people of color and Jews are honorary white people.
So, when you hear someone denigrate anti-Semitic attacks, you’ll often hear, right alongside it, denigration of “Islamophobia”. This whataboutery is, I think, almost unique to Jews. You cannot condemn attacks on Jews without condemning attacks on Muslims at the same time. It’s like saying “Black Lives Matter—and so do Asian ones.” It’s not simply an American attempt to be fair, but expresses the uniquely unhappy position of Jews in this world.
At any rate, the failure to include Muslims when condemning anti-Semitism just cost April Powers her job as the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Editors’ (SCBWI) first “Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer”. All she did was issue a statement condemning anti-Semitism. Her mistake was not only to issue that statement without mentioning “Islamophobia”, but also to defend what she did on Facebook. For that she was fired. The irony is that April Powers is not only Jewish, but black.
This ridiculous situation, so common in Young Adult Fiction—I nominate that field, along with the Knitting Community, as the Wokest area of endeavor in America—is described on Bari Weiss’s site in a nice piece by Kat Rosenfield. You can read it for free by clicking on the screenshot below.
Here’s April Powers, the once Chief Equity and Inclusion officer, hired last year
Below: Rosenfield’s description of the SCBWI. I’ve followed their shenanigans over the years, and they seem to me nothing more than a group of sanctimonious Pecksniffs whose purpose is to ensure that no young adult literature is published that doesn’t conform to their ideological views. They are, pure and simple, a bunch of odious censors.
The Society for Children’s Book Writers and Editors is an organization for established and aspiring professionals in children’s and young adult literature. The publishing industry is famously left-wing, but the world of children’s publishing makes the rest of the industry look like milquetoast moderates. In the past few years, Young Adult authors have rewritten already published work deemed offensive. They have seen the ratings of a not-yet-released book torpedoed by organized takedown campaigns on Goodreads. They have cancelled their own titles after (often flimsy) allegations of racism, or been compelled to reveal private, even traumatic details of their lives in order to “prove” that they have the standing to tell certain kinds of stories. In one particularly notorious case, Kirkus Reviews retracted its starred review of the novel “American Heart” and issued a new one scolding its “problematic” elements after a Twitter outrage.
It was in that context that the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Editors put up a post on Facebook that began: “The SCBWI unequivocally recognizes that the world’s 14.7 million Jewish people (less than 0.018% of the population) have the right to life, safety, and freedom from scapegoating and fear.” The June 10 post went on to condemn antisemitism as “one of the oldest forms of hatred,” and asked readers to “join us in not looking away.”
Here’s that post.
Things rapidly got out of hand when SCBWI member Razan Abdin-Adnani (described as the daughter of Palestinian refugees) asked if the organization “also planned to denounce violence against Palestinians.” Powers responded that the statement reflects “recent surges in hate crimes & violence around the world. If we see a surge against Muslims globally as we have w/other groups, expect us to speak up.”
Engaging like that was a big mistake, and the Facebook fracas got hostile. Then it spread to Twitter, which of course is toxic, and Abdin-Adnani demanded a refund of her membership dues.
Rosenfeld describes the downfall of Powers, accompanied by the usual fulsome apologies, including, sadly, one by Powers herself:
You might imagine that this would have been a good time for the organization to take a principled stand, to condemn this member’s inappropriate behavior, and to make a strong statement in support of its employees, particularly its black, Jewish diversity chief.
Instead, SCBWI stayed silent as the controversy continued to blow up online. Both Powers and the SCBWI account blocked Abdin-Adnani as her tweets got more intemperate, contributing to a narrative that she had been “silenced.” Big accounts on YA Twitter signal boosted her complaints. Prominent authors demanded apologies and vowed boycotts.
Then, two weeks after the original Facebook post, Lin Oliver, the executive director of SCBWI, offered a groveling apology. Not to the Jews, for failing to stand by a simple denunciation of antisemitism, nor to a faithful employee, whom SCBWI had left to twist in the wind, but to “everyone the Palestinian community who felt unrepresented, silenced, or marginalized.” The statement went on to acknowledge “the pain our actions have caused to our Muslim and Palestinian members” — pain brought on, it seems, by daring to oppose violence against Jews. “I also want to offer my apologies to Razan Abdin-Adnani for making her feel unseen and unheard by blocking her. She has been unblocked from our feed,” Oliver wrote. (Oliver and Abdin-Adnani did not respond to requests for comment.)
Although Powers insists that SCBWI did not compel her resignation, SCBWI happily took credit for it. The apology noted: “As a remedy to these events, we have taken some initial steps: 1. Effective immediately, we have accepted the resignation of April, our Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer.”
Toward the end of the organization’s apology was an abject note from Powers herself: “By posting an antisemitism statement, our intention was to stay out of politics. . . . I neglected to address the rise in Islamophobia, and deeply regret that omission. . . While this doesn’t fix the pain and disappointment that you feel by my mishandling of the moment, I hope you will accept my sincerest apologies and resignation from the SCBWI.”
What began as a simple denunciation of antisemitism ended with a letter that reads like a hostage video.
Have a look at SCBWI director Lin Oliver’s apology for neglecting to include Palestinians. Here’s a bit of that:
The words fall into the familiar order, “undrepresented, silenced, or marginalized.” All that’s missing is “violence”, “offense”, and “erasure”.
I’m saddened that Powers felt she had to apologize, too, as she had not the slightest reason to. But she is described as being an accommodating and diplomatic person, and didn’t want to make waves. At least she refuses to apologize for writing the statement about anti-Semitism.
Rosenfield ends eloquently, even adding what I see as an allusion to the movie “Chinatown”:
For the moment, at least, Jews are Schrodinger’s victims; they may or may not be deserving of sympathy, depending on who’s doing the victimizing. When a group of tiki torch-wielding white nationalists chant “Jews will not replace us!,” the condemnation is swift. But replace the tiki torch with a Palestinian flag, and call the Jews “settler colonialists,” and the equivocations roll in: Maybe that guy who threw a firebomb at a group of innocent people on the street in New York was punching up, actually?
April Powers naively believed that American Jews should get the same full-throated defense as any other minority group in the wake of a vicious attack, without ambivalence, caveats and whataboutism. That belief cost her the security of a job.
In the words of that unseen videographer: This is America, guys.
Palestinians and Muslims have cowed the American Left to the extent that no denunciation of anti-Semitic violence is possible without including a mention of “Islamophobia”. Asians, Hispanics, and other minorities don’t have the same power.
It took me 60 years to realize this, although I could have seen it all along. I presume other readers have the same experience, but I’m posting this to see if that’s true.
When I read any kind of book with a plot, be it a novel (my latest was All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski; highly recommended) or a non-scholarly book that has locations (the one I’m reading now is Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis), I immediately begin forming images of the scenes. In the case of Davis’s book, he describes scenery in great detail, and I’ve also seen some of the places he mentions, like the Everest region and Darjeeling, so it’s not hard to fill in the details in my head.
But in the case of novels, I realize that from the moment I begin reading one, I form mental images of the landscape, houses, or other places described in the book. When I read Gatsby, for instance, I can see the curtained living room of Tom and Daisy’s home, even though it’s not described in detail. And when I say “see”, I envision where all the chairs, tables, and sofas are located. When Bloom feeds his cat (mrgnkao!) and makes breakfast for Molly at the beginning of Ulysses, I have an image in my head of what his kitchen looks like, even though it’s not described.
And this persists all the way through a novel. Undoubtedly my imaginings have no relationship to what the author imagined, but I find I cannot read a book without doing this.
The curious thing is that my imaginings of what people look like are far less vivid, even if they’re described by the author. As my father used to tell me as a brain teaser, “Jerry, imagine a face you haven’t seen before.” I couldn’t do it! And I can’t imagine a face very well when it’s described in a novel. I can imagine Tom and Daisy’s house and living room, but I can’t clearly imagine what Tom or Daisy look like. I know that Anna Karenina is beautiful and Vronsky is handsome, but all I can imagine is a dress and a uniform.
This also goes for voices. And yet, when I see a movie made from a book, if there’s a big incongruity between what I hear on the screen and what I imagine the voices should sound like, it can be so jarring that I don’t want to watch the movie. (For years I followed Peanuts in the papers and kept a scrapbook with every Sunday comic strip. When they turned it into a cartoon show, the characters’ voices sounded so different from the ones I had imagined, though not consciously, that I could never watch the cartoon.)
Of course this doesn’t cause a problem when I watch a movie before I read the book (The Last Picture Show is one example), because I automatically translate the movie voices into the voices of the characters in the novel.
This is all very strange to me. Yet sometimes I think it’s impossible to read a novel without at the same time running a kind of movie through your head. Is this the case for other people?
p.s. This is NOT what Charlie Brown would sound like. (And what’s weirder is that I have no idea what he should sound like.)
You might remember my post back in February reporting how a Princeton classics professor, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, was trying to dismantle “classics” studies not only because they concentrate on white thinkers, but also, he claims, undergird racism and white supremacy. I objected, as did Andrew Sullivan and many others. But I expect to see further dismantling of “classic studies” on similar grounds as universities throughout the West become more woke.
Classics, of course, involves the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature, and, as I’ve mentioned, ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t have a notion of “whiteness”. Yes, they had slaves, but most of those slaves were also white. The implication that the ancients were racists in today’s sense is simply wrong, and a horrible reason to get rid of classics departments.
But go they will. The latest is at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. As the Washington Post reported a few days ago, the University is on the verge of dissolving its Classics Department:
The decision to dissolve the department comes after a three-year review of Howard’s academic programs, said Alonda Thomas, a spokeswoman for the university. Officials determined the classics department, which does not offer a major, could be disbanded and its courses dispersed to other academic units, “which will allow the university to function more effectively and efficiently,” Thomas said.
Is that the real reason? I doubt it. There’s more:
A handful of classes taught within the division will be absorbed into other liberal arts departments, university officials said.
The decision has left students and professors scrambling to save the department, saying Howard is the only historically Black university with a classics department. A spokeswoman for the university did not immediately confirm that.
The department apparently has eight professors, four of them untenured. Those four will be let go, while the tenured profs disperse to other departments.
You can see the department webpage here, and their offerings are not insubstantial. Although there is no major in classics, there are minors in Classical Civilization, Latin, and Ancient Greek, and a fair number of courses. Surely at least half those courses will vanish as half the department is fired. And it’s sad that the only historically black university with a classics department will be depriving black students of the chance to study the ancients. Does it really matter if they were “white”? Isn’t the content of their character more germane?
Among those objecting to the department’s disbanding are Cornel West and Jeremy Tate, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post calling the department’s loss a “spiritual catastrophe” (click on screenshot below to read their op-ed). And nobody is going to criticize West and Tate for being white supremacists! Here are their mini-bios from the article:
Cornel West is a professor of the practice of public philosophy at Harvard University and serves on the board of academic advisers of the Classic Learning Test. Jeremy Tate is the founder and chief executive officer of the Classic Learning Test.
And you probably know that West, who’s black, has long been an anti-racist, Leftist, socialist, and “radical democrat”, and has written extensively decrying segregation and inequality. Tate is white, and the Classic Learning Test is a new test designed to replace the SAT as a standardized test, though all standardized tests of that sort are probably doomed. The staff of the Classic Learning Test looks fairly multiracial, for what that’s worth.
But on to the short editorial.
West and Tate note at the outset that both Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. found solace and inspiration in thinkers like Socrates, Cicero and Cato. And then they give their reasons for opposing Howard’s decision. They soft-pedal the white supremacy trope because they’re not trying to be divisive; rather, they want to emphasize why classics is important for everyone, including African Americans:
. . . . today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.
Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.
Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.
Note that “Western crimes” is a euphemism, surely, for both racism and colonialism. But they consciously have decided to avoid connecting classics with racism—a wise decision. Although there’s a bit too much emphasis on “spirituality” in the editorial—West is a Christian—the authors rightly decry the utilitarian nature of modern education while at the same time urging blacks to engage with the intellectual rigor of the Classics:
The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University. For this is no ordinary discussion.
The Western canon is an extended dialogue among the crème de la crème of our civilization about the most fundamental questions. It is about asking “What kind of creatures are we?” no matter what context we find ourselves in. It is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial.
Howard University is not removing its classics department in isolation. This is the result of a massive failure across the nation in “schooling,” which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education. Education draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity. It is the maturation and cultivation of spiritually intact and morally equipped human beings.
Students must be challenged: Can they face texts from the greatest thinkers that force them to radically call into question their presuppositions? Can they come to terms with the antecedent conditions and circumstances they live in but didn’t create? Can they confront the fact that human existence is not easily divided into good and evil, but filled with complexity, nuance and ambiguity?
This classical approach is united to the Black experience. It recognizes that the end and aim of education is really the anthem of Black people, which is to lift every voice. That means to find your voice, not an echo or an imitation of others. But you can’t find your voice without being grounded in tradition, grounded in legacies, grounded in heritages.
There’s more, but this is a substantial part of the editorial. I especially like the last paragraph above. Of course education in “heritages” must include black heritage. But given the richness of classical thought, it would be foolish to rule it irrelevant by deeming it racist or colonialist. Kudos to West and Tate!
