Alice meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Sir John Tenniel
‘Correcting’ language, ostensibly to protect particular victim groups, is in the news. This time the works of Roald Dahl are in the cross-hairs but, as we all know, there is a broad campaign to ‘adjust’ and censor language across a vast range of situations and applications.
These activities are particularly pronounced at the moment but they are certainly not unprecedented, so I thought I’d riff on the topic. Of particular interest to me is ‘Why does this happen?’
If you are so minded, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Shakespeare’s The Tragedie of King Lear is not a bundle of laughs: rather, it is an unflinching presentation of the Apocalypse:
Is this the promis’d end?
Or image of that horror?
Fall and cease.1
That’s the culmination. This is the beginning:
Though the wisdom of nature can reason thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourg’d by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discords; in palaces, treason; the bond crack’d between son and father. … We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.2
Gloucester, who delivers those words, has his eyes gouged out. The Fool, one of the wisest of the characters, is hanged, as is Lear’s honest daughter, Cordelia. All of which hastens the death of King Lear himself.
So, hardly a bundle of laughs and yet, for me, definitely the greatest of all the plays I have read and seen in my lifetime. However, from 1681 (that’s just 65 years after Shakespeare’s death) for a period of more than 160 years, a very different version of the play was staged: a version that turned this high point of Shakespeare’s achievements into what amounts to a rom-com.
The literary crime was committed by Nahum Tate (1652-1715), an Irish poet who, from 1692, was poet laureate. Re-titling it The History of King Lear, Tate concocted a love story between Cordelia and Edgar and re-wrote it all so that Lear survives, living on happily with Cordelia and Edgar on the throne. The Fool was altogether excised. The version even got the approval of Doctor Samuel Johnson on the grounds that Shakespeare’s original robbed us all of our natural desire for justice. He’d have done well in Hollywood. But you get the point - some of us are convinced we know what’s best for other people.
Later, in 1807, The Family Shakespeare was published …
in which nothing is added to the original Text: but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a Family.3
This, the work of an English doctor called Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) and his sister, Harriet, was an attempt to expunge any offensive ideas, especially those that might cause a maiden to blush. So, for example, in Hamlet, Ophelia accidentally drowns rather than committing suicide, and Doll Tearsheet, a prostitute, is entirely expunged from Henry IV Part 2.
Not that this was sufficient to satisfy Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. In the Preface to his last novel, Sylvie and Bruno, Carroll states his desire to write …
a “Shakespeare” for girls: that is, an edition in which everything not suitable for the perusal of girls of (say) from 10 to 17, should be omitted. … Neither Bowdler’s, Chambers’s, Brandram’s nor Cundell’s “Boudoir” Shakespeare seems to me to meet the want: they are not sufficiently “expurgated”. Bowdler’s is the most extraordinary of all: looking through it, I am filled with a deep sense of wonder, considering what he has left in, that he should have cut anything out!4
This highlights the problem perfectly: the censors of one age simply cannot imagine what the censors of a later age might deem offensive.
To bring this right up to date, as has been well-publicized, the publisher of the late Roald Dahl’s stories has very recently changed hundreds of words and passages in Dahl’s work to make them politically correct. Here on Substack, Michael Shellenberger has written an excellent piece on this topic - The Narcissism of Woke Totalitarianism . In it, Shellenberger makes the point that this campaign of political correctness will not end with the stories of Roald Dahl.
I think he’s right. For instance, the woke Stasi may well have Lewis Carroll in their sights. To be clear, I am against any and all censorship of this kind but, given Carroll’s own liking for a certain amount of ‘Retrospective Text Adjustment’ (RTA), there might be a certain literary justice to it in his case.
Take, for example, Through the Looking-Glass Chapter 4 where we are introduced to Tweedledum and Tweedledee. An introductory poem alerts us to the fact that the two have agreed to have a battle. But …
Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;5
Whoa! If black tractors are a no-go in the Roald Dahl RTA then surely black crows are verboten, even if you’d have to go a long way to find a crow of any other shade. And what about the offensive proximity of ‘monstrous’ and ‘black’?
A few lines later Alice asks Tweedledum and Tweedledee a question, in response to which …
… the fat little men only looked at each other and grinned.
Horror of horrors! ‘Fat’ has been expunged from a Dahl story so presumably it should be struck down here? And the combination of ‘fat little’ is even more outrageous, isn’t it? To make matters worse, when Alice and the duo dance …
The other two dancers were fat, and very soon out of breath.
Oh, I feel faint. Bring the sal volatile!
Why?
Why is a tsunami of this censorious nonsense happening now? Actually that’s not quite right. It’s not nonsense. Nonsense makes it sound trivial and this is far from trivial. It’s horrific and a very real threat to the foundations of our most evolved societies. It is, as Melanie Phillips has labeled it, cultural totalitarianism. So, why are we now being subjected to what seems a particularly large helping of cultural totalitarianism?
Here’s a theory.
Cultural totalitarianism is an intermittent feature of all human societies:
It becomes especially prominent and polarized each time there is, as now, a Great Reset
Is it part of an auto-process6 of, every so often, forcing human societies to address current and possible future social and functional systems?
It has focused, over at least the past two millennia7, on what we would now label a traditional conception of human society. The fundamental underpinning of this seems invariably to end up as a debate between 'the autonomous individual' and 'the dominating elite', between 'bottom up' and 'top down' power structures
Given that the current Great Reset is the first to encompass the whole planet, should we maintain our traditional conception of a human society or replace it with something new?
Some background notes
Peter Drucker, a great 20th century management thinker, wrote about a Great Reset (his term is ‘transformation’) in the thirteenth century …
… when the European world, almost overnight, became centred in the new city - with the emergence of city guilds as the new dominant social groups and with the revival of long-distance trade; with the Gothic, that eminently urban, indeed practically bourgeois, new architecture; with the new painting of the Sienese; with the shift to Aristotle as the fountainhead of wisdom; with urban universities replacing as the centres of culture the monasteries in their rural isolation; with the new urban Orders. the Dominicans and Franciscans, emerging - as the carriers of religion, of learning, of spirituality; and within a few decades, with the shift from Latin to the vernacular and with Dante creating European literature.8
Let's call this event GR0 (Great Reset 0). A key element missing from Drucker's beautiful, and beautifully succinct, description is that of political and cultural control. But that was behind it all. Across the Italian city states, there was a battle between the Guelfs (who supported the Pope) and the Ghibellines (who supported the Holy Roman Emperor).9
The next Great Reset window GR1 (1450-1520 CE) was triggered by Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type and Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. At this point, the underlying trend of these Great Resets becomes clearer - a battle between individual liberty and some form of group control based on blind faith.
Whereas, GR0 featured a struggle between two shades of Catholicism, in GR1 the schism clarified itself as between Catholicism (a top-down power structure with God at the pinnacle, and group control headed by an elite) and Protestantism (preaching the bottom-up power of the autonomous individual, based on the revolutionary idea of the God within each and every person).
In addition, this was the period when the scientific method was distilled. A key point about Copernicus’s proof of heliocentrism was the fact that every detail was written down and published.
The Book of the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was and is an all-time worst seller. Its first edition, Nuremberg 1543, numbered a thousand copies, which were never sold out.10
Okay, so it wasn’t a publishing success, but the important thing is that it was written down and a robust scientific method precedent created.
Next came the GR2 window (1775-1850 CE), triggered by the invention of the steam engine and a shift in Protestant philosophy to an even more individual basis and a heightened work ethic.
By this time, the rules and regulations, particularly in Britain, northern Europe and the United States more reliably protected individual rights (including, crucially, property rights), and favored individual effort and entrepreneurship.
A problem with GR2 is that, for some people, it appears, it may have been too successful. The problem? It changed the world for the better! This was the Enlightenment and it ushered in a period committed to rational thought and a blossoming of the scientific method. The results are plain to see, succinctly put in an article in McKinsey Quarterly11:
Life isn’t drastically better for billions of people today than it was in 1800 because we are allocating the resources of the 19th-century economy more efficiently. Rather, it is better because we have life-saving antibiotics, indoor plumbing, motorized transport, access to vast amounts of information, and an enormous number of technical and social innovations that have become available to much (if not yet all) of the world’s population. The genius of capitalism is that it both creates incentives for solving human problems and makes those solutions widely available. And it is solutions to human problems that define prosperity, not money.
And, oh, another result of all this was an increase in human population; an eight-fold increase from 1 billion in 1800 to 8 billion now.
Is everybody happy about this? No. You already know that, but it’s useful to restate the context. Here are what I understand to be three big issues for those who oppose the continuance of the status quo:
The system produces inequality with activity of the last two centuries disproportionately benefiting ‘the West’. This opinion tends to disregard massive advances, particularly since the millennium, to reduce global poverty but, nonetheless, it’s a point of view.
Digital technologies have, for the first time, enabled truly global businesses and these can game the system, usually to the advantage of the West and, now, China.
It is felt that the success has brought us right up against some uncomfortable limits of human activity. We are told that, directly and indirectly, our eight-fold (and rising) population puts pressure on ourselves and everything else on the planet through our requirements for food and other resources. It is claimed that the negative outcomes include factors affecting the well-being – survival, even – of our own and other species, including waste, and the effects on climate.
So, the irony is that the entrepreneurial free-for-all that was initiated by GR1 then powerfully accelerated by GR2, and that gave our species the ability to flourish and enjoy hitherto unimagined health and wealth, is now viewed by some as dangerous and destructive.
So, now, at GR3, which is a global event for the very first time, there is a great deal of fear, particularly since, in the 20th century, we actually developed technologies that have the capability to destroy us all.
It seems to me that we end up on the horns of a very tricky dilemma. Do we use the traditional conception of a human society to try to move the Doomsday clock back from a few seconds to midnight, or do we need to apply a new conception?
A candidate for an alternative may come from the ‘function systems’ work of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998), about whom more next time. For now, by way of introduction, here’s a snippet to introduce a little of his thinking:
One cannot imagine that a consciousness could have evolved without communication. Similarly, one cannot imagine that there would be meaningful communication without consciousness. There must have been a kind of coordination that, because it relates to different forms of autopoiesis, lead, on the one hand, to an increase of complexity within the realm of possible mental contents, and, on the other hand, within the realm of social communication. It seems to me that this mechanism of coupling is language.12
Aha, does this help explain the current vogue for ‘politically correcting’ texts? If language is the mechanism that links consciousness and communication, it stands to reason that, if you can mess with the language you can control communication. Mess with that and you mess with minds. It’s a point that George Orwell made, over and over again. He also wrote this:
Prose literature as we know it is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual.13
Which seems to bring us full-circle back to the long-drawn-out battle between the autonomous individual and the elite-led group, between top-down and bottom-up power. As you may have gathered, I’m with the individual, every time. But have we reached the end of the road with that dynamic? Do we need to frame it all within a new logic?
Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear what you think.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3 (Printed 1608)
Ibid. Act 1, Scene 2.
Bowdler, Thomas. The Family Shakespeare (1807)
Carroll, Lewis. Preface to Sylvie and Bruno - Part 1 (1889)
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass (1871)
More about this next time as part of Niklas Luhmann’s work, including autopoiesis in social systems. It seems to me to provide an explanation for why human groups seem periodically to become mentally unhinged, often mimicking religious fervor in the process. See, The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle for an excellent commentary on this phenomenon. Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun is also very good.
Since at least the Axial Period which was the 300 year period in the middle of the first century BCE. “What is new about this age … is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations.” Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History (1953)
Drucker, Peter. Post-capitalist Society (1993)
For a beautifully written, designed and illustrated overview of this and much, much more, see Stevenson, Jane. Siena: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval City (2022)
Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)
Beinhocker, Eric and Hanauer, Nick in Redefining Capitalism, McKinsey Quarterly (September 2014)
Luhmann, Niklas. Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. Translated by Joseph O’Neil, et al. Stanford University Press (2002)
Orwell, George. The Prevention of Literature (1946)
I'm just about smart enough to understand what you write.
I'm probably not smart enough to add anything sensible.
However: "[the] battle between the autonomous individual and the elite-led group ..." I get the context for this statement, but must a group necessarily be elite-led? Granted, groups are usually led by a leader (duh), but elite? I fall squarely into the individually inclined camp myself, but I'm perfectly, pragmatically willing to band together with the other malcontents on order to get at the overreaching bastards!