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?
