The obscenity laws are left behind, but the cancel culture is on Lolita's heels. There was an admonitory letter in the Sunday Book Review section of the Times earlier this year.
False. The company that sells the books decided to cease publication and sales.
> Six Dr. Seuss books — including “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” and “If I Ran the Zoo” — will stop being published because of racist and insensitive imagery, the business that preserves and protects the author’s legacy said Tuesday.
> The other books affected are “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” and “The Cat’s Quizzer.”
> The decision to cease publication and sales of the books was made last year after months of discussion, the company, which was founded by Seuss’ family, told AP.
Of course. This is popular media. Nothing is ever beyond criticism and sometimes that criticism leads to curtailment of broadcast or public availability. That's what freedom of speech/choice means. No movie/book/show is forever beyond reproach. Nobody can be forced to watch or read something. We are all free to organize our friends to stop watching too. When coupled to a free and competitive market, freedom of speech means unpopular works will disappear from shelves.
Sigh. Nobody has cancelled Dr. Seuss. The publisher has decided not to publish a small number of his works which contain some stereotypes and characterisations which are pretty far from what most people would see as "fine" now. Nobody has made them do this, nobody is going round collecting and burning copies already in print. Many books stop being published all the time for all kinds of reasons - being out of step with contemporary mores and experiences is, and always has been, one of them.
The current climate gives corporations incentives to perform self-wokifying PR stunts (like this) to shield themselves from random angry tweets going viral.
It's risk management, not the company being moral or anything.
If people stopped buying individual products because they're no longer "fine", like it's always been done, then I'd agree with you: it's no longer profitable, and it's their own motivation to discontinue it.
But the current trend is that a digital angry mob will try to burn the company/creator/distributor and their reputation with it, even if the product is just there for historical reasons.
Such trend is turning regular IP management into a sea of cost and risk matrices, and I wouldn't be surprised if within 5 years there are insurance policies (and therefore actuaries) dealing with cancellation scenarios.
> Many books stop being published all the time for all kinds of reasons
Not with auto-back-patting press releases, self-congratulatory social media posts and look-at-us official statements to the media.
In this case it could be good business sense. From The Guardian [1]: Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in 1904 and died in 1991. More than 600m copies of his books are in circulation, earning Dr Seuss Enterprises about $33m before tax in 2020, up from $9.5m in 2015, according to the company.
Forbes listed Dr Seuss as the second highest-paid dead celebrity of 2020, in part thanks to multimillion-dollar film and TV deals but mostly because of sales of his books.
It is probably prudent, from a business/investment perspective, for a publisher (or rights owner) to ring-fence works that it considers problematic, by being seen proactively to remove them from sale and stating the reason. This would tend to mitigate the chance of an intemperate backlash against the entire Dr Seuss catalogue.
People, and organisations, self-censor all the time. It may be problematic, depending on the circumstances, and the external pressures and forces which lead them to do so. In this particular case, I don't see anything overly damaging about the cause > effect: "many people are not comfortable, and do not enjoy, reading crude racial caricatures" > "we'll stop publishing some books which contain them".
“Every publisher must be forced to continually publish every item that exists in their catalogue, even if the publisher themselves finds that item embarrassingly racist. Otherwise, the SJWs win.”
Seriously this is just incoherent. Dr. Seuss himself amended some of his past work while he was still alive because he was embarrassed by his earlier racism. His estate is certainly allowed to make similar decisions. It is not censorship.
Kind of. But if somebody else wants to publish these books in particular, they could probably buy the rights to do so for a suitable price. Whether that price would be higher or lower now is an interesting philosophical debate, but the fact that it's possible to do so, given appropriate capital, takes this out of the realm of censorship (subjective opinion, clearly).
> Kind of. But if somebody else wants to publish these books in particular, they could probably buy the rights to do so for a suitable price.
I highly doubt that. "Dr. Seuss" is as much a brand as a collection of works, and the decision to stop publishing those books is pretty clearly brand management.
But aren't there lots of books/movies/etc that are "pretty far from what most people would see as 'fine' now"?
I watched Birth of a Nation in college for a film class. It's considered the one of the first feature films.
Now I don't particularly like Birth of a Nation, I'm not attached to it (I feel asleep during the screening). I'm also not attached to Dr. Suess. But I know there are definitely things that I am attached to that the "powers that be" will deem too offensive to publish or distribute any longer. And so I find this turn of events disturbing. I want them to keep publishing these books as long as there is demand and, by arguing for that, I am defending the "offensive" things that I do like.
This is all very basic liberalism. I'm an atheist but I will defend people's right to worship and, in doing so, I am defending my own right not to worship. It's disturbing to me to see how the basic tenets of liberal civilization have become cliche in people's minds.
I think were there sufficient demand to counterbalance the potential awkwardness of publishing something which will offend, they would still be publishing it. Nobody is stopping them doing so. Indeed, if someone felt so strongly about this that they wished to see it re-published, there is probably a sum of money which would acquire the rights and allow them to do so. This book has not been banned. Should someone acquire the rights to it and decide to publish, they may do so unhindered.
There are, however, many creative works which are no longer published because they are just too far from what people would see as fine now. They're generally unlamented, but nothing is stopping someone from publishing them again, if they fancy losing money.
> I think were there sufficient demand to counterbalance the potential awkwardness of publishing something which will offend, they would still be publishing it.
Do you have any evidence that customer demand is driving this decision? Anyway I think you're missing the point entirely.
These books no longer being published is part of a broader pattern in which an intolerant minority dictates things to a mostly indifferent majority. Should 5% of the population dictate to 95% of the population? If most people find X offensive, I think it's fine if that gets priced into a publisher's decision. But if 5% of people (who graduated from elite colleges and were quickly hired by venerable institutions) find X offensive while the rest of the population doesn't give a shit, then I think those 5% should shove it.
If most people are indifderent to some book, the book wont sell amd wont be printed anymore. You need people who actually like and want it for it to continue to be in print.
Or I guess shorter copyright, so that it is on guttenberg.
> This is all very basic liberalism. I'm an atheist but I will defend people's right to worship and, in doing so, I am defending my own right not to worship. It's disturbing to me to see how the basic tenets of liberal civilization have become cliche in people's minds.
I don't recall where I read this idea, but liberalism is a particular trade off between two social goods: justice and peace. A big diverse group of people will have factions with incompatible ideas of what justice is, and will tend to fight each other over them. Liberalism is mainly compelling when people are sick of those fights, and are willing to trade the pursuit of justice (and some other things) for peace. However, the more successful it is, the more valuable justice and those other things become, and Liberalism becomes less compelling.
> This is all very basic liberalism. I'm an atheist but I will defend people's right to worship and, in doing so, I am defending my own right not to worship. It's disturbing to me to see how the basic tenets of liberal civilization have become cliche in people's minds.
The woke bullying and intimidation tactics are just too powerful at shutting down debate. It's no longer even permissible to agree on goals but disagree on the means. Disagreement is seen as evidence of bad faith and of secretly being a fascist. E.g., suppose that one values racial equality highly but thinks that defunding police is harmful to this end (see [0] for some evidence that decreased policing harms the poor). It will be extremely difficult for you to advocate this position without being constantly derailed, because people have been trained to see any kind of noncomformity as suspicious. They won't outright accuse you of racism usually, but they will say that you might be racist or that you sound similar to a secret racist. This is incredibly effective at derailing the discussion and avoiding any real debate. Even if you manage to make your points well, they will be forever tainted by the stain of the baseless accusations. You lose even if you win.
I think most people are still reasonable and still value liberal civilization, but they're either too terrified to speak out or they're isolated from what's going on and don't see a problem. Of course, by the time the problems are so widespread that everyone can see them, it may be too late to do anything about it. Control over information is the most powerful political tool one can have, and the woke left are too intoxicated with this power to heed any warnings.
"It's not censorship, it's just <...>. And any ways, you still have <XYZ>".
No, it absolutely is censorship. This is a cowardly defense of it, trying to reframe it as something understandable.
Edit: The intellectual dishonesty from the censorship apologists is more than I can bear. Is it so hard to delineate between a publisher ceasing to print a book because there is no demand, and a publisher refusing to publish a book because it is offensive?
We've become a society that can't tell it's right hand from it's left.
So every publisher that's ever reject any piece of work is a censor?
It's not censorship to decide to no longer publish something. It's only censorship if someone comes along and stops you from publishing it.
The owners of the work have decided to stop publishing it. They have that right. No one can force them to publish a damn thing. Forcing someone to say or publish something they do not believe in anymore (or perhaps never believed in) is dystopian and tyrannical.
Publishers are a business, generally speaking. To address your edit: What is the upside to a publisher of publishing a book widely (though not universally) considered offensive? Especially if that books is aimed at children?
Clearly, they consider what demand there is to be not worth the expense and potential reputational risk of satisfying. You can say that this last part is a form of censorship - but in reality, it's just how cultures work. There are things which are considered taboo. You may do them if you wish, but you have no right to say they should be consequence free.
> What is the upside to a publisher of publishing a book widely (though not universally) considered offensive?
Gosh! Now that I think of it, I honestly can't see any! Publishers are directly responsible for giving a platform to thought, and therefore, for giving that thought legs.
I only regret not thinking of this centuries ago, and using it to cen^H^H^H decide not to publish many of the things today that are considered normal, back when they were considered widely offensive!
NSFW and spoiler tags work well enough (e.g. on reddit), that's the model that should be extended rather than content removal. Even something like MPAA ratings would beat content removal.
See Lady and the Tramp (which they're already monkeying with, and probably won't make it much longer altogether) vs. "Stark Raving Dad".
I'm sure I'm missing something, I don't know enough about the Telecommunications Act of '96, but it seems like as soon as you start actively removing content (as opposed to labeling, for optional group- or user-level screening) or editorializing it (as opposed to aggregating and determining what's statistically trending), section 230 goes out the window.
Your suppressing my thoughts by pushing them down the page where nobody can see and providing a big wall of text denial that amounts to "I think I'm right."
The problem is that there's no consistent principle for calling this censorship without entirely gutting the concept of free speech and replacing it with some politicized caricature of itself.
If we use the US 1st Amendment approach, then publishing is a speech action, and refusal to publish is also a speech action. Specifically, the decision to not publish a book in this particular case is political speech - the publisher stopped publishing these books specifically to signal that they are opposed to forms of racism. This is, again, free speech, and telling the publisher that they cannot refuse to publish a book is a form of censorship. What argument are you going to use to say that someone should be allowed to write an offensive book but that publishers should not be allowed to refuse it's publication?
If your argument is that book publishers should act as common carriers, that would imply a significant reworking of how publishers operate. This would be akin to saying that hedge fund managers have to buy all stocks equally regardless of performance or fundamentals. Remember, publishers are not just "people who publish things", they are companies that invest capital into creative works. This requires them to take highly subjective opinions about the works they look at on a day to day basis, because they are making investment decisions. This is entirely not what a common carrier is and regulating them as such would basically be turning the entire market into self-publishing, with all the problems that would entail.
If your argument is that book publishers have too much market power, that... doesn't really work. Competition and antitrust law targets entities who take action to restrict trade. So, for example, if another publisher had said, "Stop publishing these Dr. Seuss books or we'll pay all our distributors to drop your other books", then that would be an antitrust concern. However, someone themselves deciding not to publish something doesn't make them a monopolist. There are plenty of valid reasons not to publish something.
You yourself mentioned not wanting to print a book because there is no demand being different from publishers not deciding to publish for political reasons. However, what if I were to tell you that those are the same thing? The Dr. Seuss books they decided not to publish weren't just racist, they were also unpopular. It turns out people just really didn't like them, probably because of the racist caricatures in the books. And again - just as the publisher is allowed to decide not to publish books they don't like, I'm allowed to not buy books that I don't like. The dichotomy between refusing to publish for economic reasons and for social or moral reasons is a false one.
If you're going to argue that social power is being abused to censor people, I mean... you're not wrong, you're just inconsistent. The very thing we're talking about - the racist caricatures that are in the books - are themselves an act of using social power to harm people. So, sure, you can use a social power argument... but now you have to consider things like social justice, intersectionality, and so forth. Remember, the whole point of racial caricature was to do social violence to a particular group of people - why would that be more protectable under this theory of justice?
The endgame is like the burning of The Library of Alexandria. 2000 years from now scholars (assuming there are any) will talk of a "missing civilisation" that mysteriously left no cultural traces.
Many of the people who disagree with "wokeness"/"cancel culture" are their own worst enemy. Hyperventilating catastrophizing hyperbole has a way of hiding the valid parts of a critique in a costume of easy-to-dismiss nonsense.
I actually like Snopes for grabbing sources, a bit like Wikipedia. Of course Snopes's conclusion is predetermined, but they do still go through the evidence before reaching the predetermined conclusion, and I find that to be a good starting point. It's much better than the fluff on PolitiFact where they leave out the most relevant data.
You've picked a pretty terrible time to try to make a point. That article seems completely accurate. Even if you don't like the source, you should at least investigate the particular content in question before you make accusations.
If we fear that they might not be available in the future, yes, buy the physical copies. But if we fear that ownership of such material may be made illegal in the future, purchasing of objects is probably not the safest thing to do. A digital copy of an illegal book acquired anonymously and then hidden carefully using encryption is less likely to be discovered in the back of a closet years after you have forgotten you owned it.
If anyone here keeps a porn collection saved on a drive somewhere, or on a bookshelf, be careful. Mistakes happen. Struggling upstart actors lie about their age. Material that was purchased legally on day one can suddenly become very dangerous to possess on day two. The laws in this area are draconian. If you have any reason to believe the material dangerous, such as a website disappearing for no apparent reason, delete the material. (This is not rare. It happens regularly. Though they would never admit it publicly, nearly every large porn studio has had some sort of issue at some point.)
Of course I would never advocate for the breaking of laws. If material is deemed illegal to possess then it must be destroyed. I speak only in the hypothetical in order to better educate those in authority on how they might discover and destroy illegal works of art.
People should buy things they want to own. When you rent things, there is explicitly no guarantee you'll have access to it later. Books, music, videos - the only way you can guarantee you'll have access to it is by owning it.
That said, we are not even remotely in farenheit 451 territory. And the author of this article doesn't spend much effort even trying to claim or defend that position.
This is actually a great article. The Times seems really split down the middle right now, you get these great articles that would fit in with the paper at its peak, and then you have some real dross. They're basically becoming their own sort of tech giant, like Google, they have tons of factions and the right hand doesn't know what the left, top, bottom, charm, strange, up, down, or left hands are doing.
They’ve always had a dizzying mixture of world-class, unique reportage and writing, and idiotic filler. What’s happening now, which is new and depressing, is stuff like firing a top reporter because the Daily Beast recycled some boring complaints by a couple of teenage girls.
> This is actually a great article. The Times seems really split down the middle right now, you get these great articles that would fit in with the paper at its peak, and then you have some real dross. They're basically becoming their own sort of tech giant, like Google, they have tons of factions and the right hand doesn't know what the left, top, bottom, charm, strange, up, down, or left hands are doing.
Which really makes the people who talk about it as a monolithic boogeyman look pretty foolish.
The headline doesn't really match the detail of the article, which notes that the work was subjected both to the obscenity laws of the time and what has been contemporarily rebranded as 'cancel culture':
> It had been initially rejected by all the big publishing houses in the United States, so Nabokov resorted to the pornographic French publisher Olympia Press, only to have it banned in France and also in Argentina, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. In England, all copies were seized by customs from 1955 until 1959, when it was finally published to huge consternation and controversy.
America construes itself as a game that anybody can play, and Russians know how to play it well, as we learn and relearn. In “Lolita,” Nabokov gave us a copy of ourselves we couldn’t tell from the original. No American writer has done the reverse—has written a novel about Russia that understood the country so profoundly, and that Russians themselves read widely and loved. “Lolita” is an American book in a way that no novel by a native-born American is a Russian book. It’s an American masterpiece of the atrocious-hilarious, like “Huckleberry Finn.” We encounter these works as best we can, and fail to civilize them, and pass by in our generations, and they remain.
In Lolita the pedophile is explicitly a creep. He's the bad guy, it's an exploration of a sick mind.
Not that content matters at all in this debate. Certainly I would say if you wanted to cancel Lolita, you would have to cancel Silence of the Lambs and any other fiction about serial killers, right? Since abusing and then killing them and then eating them is at least as bad as abusing them, but not killing them and not eating them?
However, I don't think that really gets to the heart of this. Morons have been locally banning books since books have existed. This isn't new at all. I think the real 'story' here is the response to it. Any time some small confederacy of imbeciles manages to announce that something is 'canceled', the media blasts it through a loud speaker and there is a huge response.
The fraction of people who change their behavior in any way due to something being canceled is tiny. Most people just don't care. The actual way these pressure campaigns work is to convince people that decision makers personally know, and who are not really paying attention, that some situation is vaguely 'icky'.
For example, the whole thing with Gina Carino. What she said was stupid and ignorant, but I doubt it would have reduced the popularity of The Mandalorian by even 1%. However, in the minds of Disney executives, people in their social circle might judge them if they keep Carino around. The exec's friends won't know the details, all they'll know is Disney didn't fire someone 'gross'. It will be a topic of conversation, the execs will have to talk about the situation at parties, and it's not easy to explain a nuanced decision. It's so much easier to just fire someone. So, because these campaigns get picked up by the media and amplified, they can get people fired because it's just the easiest way for those making the decisions wash their hands of the situation, even though maybe 0.001% of people really care about the situation at all. (For the record, I think Gina is a horrible actress and the stuff she said was extremely ignorant, so I don't care if she gets fired or not. The point is, I don't really care, if they didn't fire her I would still watch the show.)
That's why I think the content doesn't matter at all. Any book is equally likely to end up canceled, all it takes is a handful of people who are trying to make a name for themselves by being outraged on Twitter, and for the media to keep amplifying the phony, self serving outrage they are Tweeting. At that point, it's just easier for people making decisions to ban whatever content or person the fake outrage is targeting.
Humbert is a creep and absolutely the bad guy. The genius is that he's also a sympathetic character and the reader is forced to struggle with that. Very few works are able to do this so well. It's the reason why it's a masterpiece as well as why it's so uncomfortable.
> In Lolita the pedophile is explicitly a creep. He's the bad guy, it's an exploration of a sick mind.
Nabokov explored infatuations with "nymphets" in multiple works, Lolita was just the most famous. This has led many (even big fans of the writer) to assume that Nabokov did feel a certain attraction that he apparently never acted on, though this observation does not imply that he or the works deserve condemnation or scorn.
> However, in the minds of Disney executives, people in their social circle might judge them if they keep Carino [sic] around.
This is too reductive an understanding. A far bigger issue is that many many actors, technicians, directors, and so on probably don’t want to work with someone like Carano - particularly nonwhite and non-cis people, but also outspoken progressives like Mark Hamill. She isn’t merely very conservative, but a racist nutjob. She’s bad for business even if she doesn’t immediately impact viewership.
This is by the way an issue of “cancel culture” that is too often ignored: it’s not just a moral judgment about an individual, it’s a judgment that they can’t be trusted to treat nonwhites/LGBT/etc with decency. Or, in the case of Dr. Seuss, it’s a judgment by the estate that Seuss’s legacy is tarnished by the outdated racist imagery he used and that some works shouldn’t be continually reprinted.
Whether she actually is racist (and I agree she seems to be given the facts available) doesn't seem to matter regarding Disney's decision.
My point is that these decisions aren't made in any way based on anything but social pressure. As you mention, the people working with her have known she is a crazy racist for a long time, and nothing was done. She got fired after 'public outrage' took hold. Media amplification of tweets is not a good system for truth finding.
As for Dr. Seuss, I'm not defending racist images. Those images have been in those books for nearly 100 years though, and almost every child and adult in the western world has seen them over and over and over. Many probably noticed them. It may well be overdue to address them. Twitter driven social pressure campaigns trying to eliminate the entire library of his books overnight by personally targeting a handful of people with the power to pull the books from shelves isn't a reasonable way for society to make these decisions.
> Twitter driven social pressure campaigns trying to eliminate the entire library of his books overnight by personally targeting a handful of people with the power to pull the books from shelves isn't a reasonable way for society to make these decisions.
That’s not what happened. Do you have a source? Because reliable sources make it clear that the publisher has been working on this internally for months[2], after years of criticism from educators.[2]
Your stance is “some people might think vicious racism is bad but nobody is allowed to criticize it, especially not teachers who work with young children.” Obviously that is transparently indefensible so you have to resort to flagrant lies about a Twitter cancellation mob plotting to take away all of Dr. Seuss. It’s pathetic, and I’m tired of pretending you people are discussing this with even a modicum of good faith.
> Your stance is “some people might think vicious racism is bad but nobody is allowed to criticize it, especially not teachers who work with young children.”
I don't think you read what I said at all. Going through life literally making up quotes for people you want to argue with, and then getting upset about the quote that you made up is pretty lazy. I think there's even a name for doing this. I think it's perfectly reasonable for the publisher to stop printing, or to modify books that have racist imagery. I don't think social media campaigns forcing quick decisions on things is a good way to do it. I misunderstood the details of what is going on with Dr. Seuss books, and you could have just pointed that out without the bluster.
I think Gina should have been fired. I think she should have been fired a year or more ago, whenever they realized she was vocally racist on the set of the show. However, they didn't fire her a year ago, or two years ago, whenever they realized it. They kept employing her all with the knowledge she was a racist. They only revisited that decision when pressure mounted to stop employing her. You might call this a check and balance, and I guess I agree with that. However, do you think, for one second, that the same execs that kept employing someone who was very vocally and indisputably racist when it was convenient for them are capable of making any moral stand on anything? When the cancel brigade comes for the next actor, they will be fired too, and it doesn't matter what the facts of the situation are. This is my point, so try quoting that. EDIT: yes I'm disagreeing with myself here, in GP I said I don't care. I don't care from the standpoint of whether I will watch the show, but I do agree with the point made that other people working on the show shouldn't be subjected to having to work with a bigot
I think it's easy to approve of a process, like social media driven firings, when you agree with the outcome. However, if the process is broken, it's just a matter of time before it has consequences that are broken too. You have illustrated my point about execs having a hard time explaining a nuanced decisions perfectly. Just by discussing this topic and not automatically agreeing with whatever you say, you have accused me of defending racism and attacking free speech.
I’m proud of the Times for publishing this fine appreciation of the great novel, especially in the context of their continuing slide into cowardice. But I was surprised to see its title set in quotes, not only in the headline but throughout the text. I had assumed that the Times had gotten a handle on basic typographic conventions by now.
I’ll cop to the tedious bit. But consider that, while “English” may not be prescriptive (odd idea, that), people can be. For example, the people who wrote this style guide: they were exactly prescribing usage for Times editors and writers. Yes, the thing I am tediously complaining about follows this guide. But the guide is wrong.
>”English” may not be prescriptive (odd idea, that)
Natural languages can’t be descriptive or prescriptive, they merely are. Grammars for those languages can be either descriptive (i.e., describing the language as used by speakers) or prescriptive (i.e., prescribe how the language should be used).
In the former case, it’s perfectly fine to freely split infinitives; in the latter it is something up with which one does not put.
Me, too. It’s quaint, but distracting. But remember that for a good part of its history they had a period after the title of the paper on the front page.
