Canary in the Cultural Coalmine

There’s a terrific interview with lockdown sceptic hero Lionel Shriver in the latest issue of the Critic. The interviewer is Robin Ashenden, someone I commissioned to write several essays and interviews when I was an Associate Editor of Quillette. Lionel doesn’t actually talk about the events of the past 18 months, but has plenty of interesting things to say about the attempt by the authoritarian left to police novelists and literature – a trend she has courageously resisted. Here is an extract.

What would you say are your detractors’ main objections to you?

I suspect my most egregious transgressions are those of tone. I am direct. I don’t hedge my points. I don’t preface my statements with a lot of “of course slavery was terrible” stuff, which is a waste of time, and I don’t qualify my positions. Multiple other authors have claimed that they can be “culturally appropriate” because they’re so respectful and they do so much humble homework, but other writers aren’t likely to be so magnificently sensitive, so those people shouldn’t put their sticky fingers on another culture’s sacred stuff.

I think this whole fake taboo is patently absurd, and all writers, no matter how talentless, careless, or crass, have a moral right to make up whatever characters they want. That kind of unabridged assertion drives the opposition insane. The other thing that drives them nuts is a sense of humour. I make jokes. Being droll about subjects that are meant to be deadly serious shoves an electric cattle prod right up the wokester ass. Of course, in my detractors’ terms I am a racist, ableist, white-supremacist, colonialist, misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic, hate-speech-spewing Islamophobe. Yawn.

Worth reading in full.