The Folly of Cancel Culture

One of America's greatest composers has warned against "tearing the house down" and urged would-be reformers of the musical cannon to accept that figures like Richard Wagner could be objectionable.

Steve Reich said that while an expansion of the canon should continue the "cancellation" of artists would "not help anyone".

Tristan and Isolde
John Duncan (1866-1945)
Photo Credit: Museums & Galleries Edinburgh [CC BY-NC-ND]

"Wagner... was a musical genius. He was unquestionably a proto-Nazi. Live with it," he said. "The idea that great artists become the most exemplary human beings is a romantic wish but demonstrably not the case."...

Wagner's antisemitism - seen in an 1850 essay, Jewishness in Music - and his subsequent adoption by Adolf Hitler has resulted in him being shunned by music education course administrators and his works are effectively banned in Israel.

He is regarded however, through works such as his Ring Cycle and Tristan and Isolde, as almost as big an influence on classical music as Monteverdi, Bach and Beethoven. Other composers, most notably Richard Strauss, have also been "cancelled" in some quarters as a result of ties with the Nazis.

Other figures have defended their playing of Wagner's music including the Israeli Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim who has said the prohibition on his works only came into effect after the "use, misuse and abuse" of his music by Hitler. It has also been pointed out that American Jewish people have also helped to fund the annual Wagner festival at Bayreuth, where the theatre was created solely for his work.

(David Sanderson, Neil Fisher, The Times, 2021)

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)