Impatience with Human Nature, Translation Madness - Cancel Culture

 I'd like you to feel sorry for some wealthy young investment bankers. Please don't stop reading. The ones in question are the junior analysts at Goldman Sachs who were in the news last week after complaining to their managers that their working conditions during lockdown had become intolerable.

The situation they describe is extraordinary. Many were putting in 98-hour weeks... How did these ambitious, smart, wealthy young people find themselves in a situation of such abjection? The answer, I think, lies in modern attitudes to human nature and a peculiarly 21st-century kind of contempt for human nature and its limitations. This contempt pervades our culture but it is explicit and most extreme in elite tech circles, where "transhumanists" dream of the day when human minds and bodies will be technologically augmented in order to make us cleverer, more physically powerful and even able to cheat death.

Zusammenbruch
Ludwig von Hofmann (1861-1945)
Photo Credit: Leicester Museums and Galleries [CC BY-NC-SA]

This sounds vaguely mad but transhumanism attracts powerful and influential followers, such as Tesla's CEO Elon Musk and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel. It hardly needs saying that implicit in transhumanism is the idea that human nature is flawed and disappointing: something to be cheated, shoved aside and overcome.

Accordingly, the working culture of Silicon Valley is pervaded by ideas about how humans might push beyond the limitations of their disappointing natures: protein supplements, AI-composed music to increase concentration, "micro-doses" of LSD taken throughout the day to increase creativity... It is one thing to volunteer to transcend your human nature, it's quite another to have transcendence forced upon you. The modern disregard for flawed humanity informs the work culture of Amazon's warehouses, where punishing computer-dictated schedules allegedly mean workers collapse at their stations, fall asleep on their feet and suffer panic attacks and joint injuries; where apparent controls on taking toilet breaks are said to mean employees sometimes have to urinate into bottles...

Facebook employs behavioural psychologists to make its products maximally addictive by hijacking the human brain's reward system... Even benign technologies such as self-service checkouts and buses you can swipe onto with an Oyster card tear away the little webs of human interaction that remind us in small doses of our humanity. The assumption that underlies those technologies is that progress and efficiency are preferable to social interaction...

(James Marriott, The Times, 2021)

Progress and efficiency? What is behind all of this? Why do these individuals treat their workforces with such contempt? For the maximisation of profit?

Translation Madness

Is a white writer allowed to translate the work of a black poet? The answer appears to be a resounding no; judging by the speed at which international publishers are dropping white translators of the work of Amanda Gorman, the young black poet who shot to fame after being selected to read at President Biden's inauguration.

The writers chosen to render her now famous poem The Hill We Climb into Dutch and Catalan had to pull out because they were white. This "cancelling" of apparently inappropriate translators is the latest troubling example of concocted social media outrage leading to moral panic and institutional capitulation.

It started after social media critics demanded to know why a white writer had been chosen to translate the work of a black woman...

Is this really where we are heading? A world in which only black people can translate the work of a black author, and by logical extension, only whites can translate other whites and only women can translate women? What is this if not a form of apartheid of the imagination?..

More recently, critically acclaimed black authors such as Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou had their work translated into French by white women. No fuss there, either: why should there be? Isn't the very point of a good translation about making the work accessible to audiences different from the author?

"Cancel culture" stories becoming ubiquitous and it's tempting to roll the eyes and shrug. But that will only encourage those who shout loudest to go even further next time...

(Jawad Iqbal, The Times, 2021)

*Lionel Shriver has described her capitulation to cancel culture, admitting that for a forthcoming book she agreed to remove dialogue she was told was "othering"...

She said: "In my upcoming book I had a little bit of an African accent in a very small dialogue.Touches of it. I was discouraged from using it because it was othering. Because it did not really hurt the book artistically I complied."

She said that she hated the word, which is defined by the British linguists professor Lynne Murphy as "treating people from another group as less human than one's own group"...

Raving Madness
Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700)
Photo Credit: Bethlem Museum of the Mind [CC BY-NC]

The rise of cancel culture and the accompanying boycotts and threats to those who opine "in the wrong way" on topics ranging from sexuality to racial politics has become a fraught subject in the arts. One side asserts that it is putting free speech at risk, while the other says it is making elites accountable.

A letter last year signed by more than 150 leading authors and academics, including JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky, warned that the "free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted".

"Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organisations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes," read the letter published in Harper's magazine. 

Shriver said there was an "Old Testament severity" to the "cancel culture movement" and argued that "free speech is not partisan but had tragically been taken over as a cause of the right"...

She added: "Liberalism has become neurotic. Because the big battles have been won and if you are a warrior... you pick pettier and pettier fights. I'm afraid that's what we have seen."

(David Sanderson, The Times, 2021)

Cancel Culture

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
unknown artist
Photo Credit: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum [CC BY-NC_ND] 

There has been no teaching at Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School in San Francisco for almost a year... When students do eventually go back to classes in the city's Sunset district one of the things they'll have to learn will be an imminent change of the school's title. It's one of 44 that the local education authority recently voted to rename... they have decided  urgent action is needed to remove from schools the names of those who had "engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those among us to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

What, you might ask, did the author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped do to diminish the opportunities of San Franciscans to the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? His offence, according to the official record, was to have written a poem called Foreign Children... It was described as "cringeworthy" by the authority not on literary grounds but because of its white privileged voice and the use of demeaning ethnic terms such as "little frosty Eskimo".

You might agree that a school that honours a children's author with a Victorian view of the world does irreparable harm to the lives of young Californians, but how about Abraham Lincoln? His name is another of those slated to be removed from a school on the grounds that his policies were "detrimental to...Native peoples of the United States". That whole freeing the slaves thing evidently didn't make the cut. 

(Gerard Baker, The Times, 2021)