Passing the Parcel of Privilege

Remember the children's party game "pass the parcel"? A much-wrapped gift is passed around a circle of kids sitting on the floor; each one takes a layer of wrapping paper and ribbon off the gift and then passes it on. The person who ends up with the last layer unwraps, and "wins", the gift. S/he is usually meant to share it with the whole group (it's often a box of candy).

Are we playing the Gift of Privilege game, as adults? Who gets to be "privileged" now? It was originally (allegedly) white men, then all white people, all educated people, and eventually all races and nations were vouchsafed "equal rights" according to late-20th century western liberal-humanitarian values. 

But then, some identity groups claimed that this was only window dressing and that some groups were still more privileged than others. Black people, brown people, aboriginals, disabled people, trans-sexuals and a proliferation of other "identities" now clamoured for not equal but special rights. Equal rights were no longer an ideal, and "people" were no longer who we thought they were: they were not ethnic groups but "people of colour", not genders but "birthing persons" not women but "persons with vaginas" (though confusingly, not always ...) People were not physically or mentally handicapped but "differently abled". Then there's Non-binary people, Two-spirit people ... in short, there's no longer any "we" in "we the people".

This Pass the Parcel of Privilege game is the new infantilization, and it's gotten out of hand, as children's games tend to. Children start by agreeing to rules but end up howling "that's not fair" when they don't perceive themselves as winning. Now that attitude has invaded the world of universities (that speaker can't speak here), of government and corporate offices (follow DEI or your DEAD to this employer), and of media (take a look at current Submissions Guidelines of book publishers and magazines). The rules of academic, professional, public and media activities are in constant flux, depending on which participant howls "not fair" the loudest this week.

Remember when some decided that literacy and the existence of the "literati" was elitist? Elitist (from the French) simply means "chosen". Society's always going to make, and disagree about, choices. At present we've chosen a new elite army for the Culture Wars. These are the troops of the culture-cancelati. It looks like this uncivil war will be a long one. The fact that it will soon be fought by out of control Artificial Intelligence will only increase the casualty rate among independent-minded liberal-democratic classically-educated humanitarians.

The Power Behind the Reading Chair

Librarians, contrary to their traditional image, are powerful social agents. Whether in public or university and college libraries, the collections they build to serve readers and researchers also curate today's readers and their research.

Librarians hold significant power because what they include or exclude from library collections shapes minds, which is why diversity of subject matter is vital. We are currently in the middle of Freedom To Read Week, and how freely people choose what to read depends largely on what they find on library shelves. Librarians must use their power to get beyond merely promoting what's already popular -- the ideological flavour of the moment which the fashionable influencers chatter about on social media.

Bookstores are in the business of providing what sells (a best seller is a book that sells because it sells best). Stores promote fashionable authors with large displays, and libraries do this too with "Fast Read" options (short borrowing periods that create fast turnaround) and face-out display on the Hot Releases shelves.

These books become hot because they're displayed and promoted, a self-fulfilling process which shapes public opinion about "good books".

It's up to the individual reader to go deeper into both the collection catalogue and the stacks behind the display shelves. If all the books on a particular topic, especially from earlier periods, seem suddenly to have gone missing, readers need to query the librarians about it.

Libraries cull book and periodical collections as well as build them, just like opinion-makers "cull" attitudes which the cancel-culturati deem inappropriate. There are plenty of library patrons (and non-patrons) who object to particular authors and subjects in these days of raging identity-bias. It's up to broad-minded readers and librarians together to resist these incursions on our shared freedom to read.

(Of further interest: https://cfe.torontomu.ca/page/cfla-and-cfe-work-together-library-challenges-database )

See also: https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2022/11/on-scroll.html

and:  https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2023/02/trigger-warning.html

Insensitivity Editors

The Lords of Sensitivity -- editors lording it over writers from Bowdlerizing keyboards -- have insensitively made life harder for satirists. How can satire parody something that insists on comprehensibly parodying itself? 

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/oompa-loompas-no-longer-tiny-sensitivity-readers-take-the-gnarl-out-of-dahl

The latest victim of "sensitivation" is kids-lit author Roald Dahl. His writing is certainly not to everyone's taste, but that doesn't give anyone the right to vandalize and steal it -- only the right to not read it. Would it be legal to seize your neighbour's car, give it a new coat of paint, and say -- here, this looks better, so get over it? Why is it legal thus to vandalize a writer's property and legacy? Whatever happened to copyright? 

Of course, a corporation like Netflix can (as they did) buy an author's legacy (in this case creating the Roald Dahl Story Company). So that gets around silly issues like respecting an author's ... authorship. The Roald Dahl Story Company is a branch of the international corporate chain of Cancel-Culture Inc.

Dahl, like Dr. Seuss and others, has been worked over by the "sensitivity" gang, part of a woke army which is nothing but insensitive to literature and the intelligence of readers. Aiming to be "progressive", this army is in fact regressive -- regressing back to the time of censorious Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825).

Bowdler, a British doctor, took it upon himself (with his sister) to re-write Shakespeare in a fashion "suitable for women and children to listen to when read aloud". Women! They need things well-sanitized of course -- but we get over the sexism of that today by doing it to all genders, including the non-binary ones or those in which men are women simply because they say they are ... And if that nonsense is protected from being criticized for scientific ridiculousness, why isn't Dahl protected? (At least his books won't suddenly pop up un-invited in women-only change rooms.)

If people want to enjoy role playing, gender-blending and cross-dressing, they should go for it. But why should those who enjoy reading freely what authors freely write, be forbidden from doing that?

(See best-selling word-craftsman Anthony Horowitz, British novelist, discussing the matter here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-clash-with-sensitivity-readers/)

Bowdler had his own reasons for re-writing Shakespeare; here's how the current sensitivity-censors do it:

https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2021/11/shakespeare-for-modern-audience.html

Free Speech Is Not Racism

Who needs words to prove a theory, when your opponents' actions already prove it? That happened at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta on Feb.2nd, when hundreds of students shouted down speaker Frances Widdowson. She had warned us that mob-mentality was threatening the free exchange of ideas -- and the mob obliged by proving her point.

The mob came out in force to "amplify black, trans and indigenous voices" when Professor Widdowson tried to deliver a talk at an institution supposedly meant to be a forum for talk.

"Racism is not free speech," screeched the mob. But if it thinks the opposite -- that free speech is racist -- we are in trouble. Free speech is the underpinning of democracy, which is measured, as one author has put it, not by the number of citizens who vote but by the number who feel free to say what they think in public.*

Professor Widdowson's topic was "How Woke-ism Threatens Academic Freedom". By saying what she thinks about that, Professor Widdowson was simply doing her job. As an academic in a university she is supposed to offer alternative thinking -- alternative, that is, to mob-thought, herd-thought and ideological hypnosis. Most politicians merely repeat back at the electorate what the electorate has shouted to them, because they want to be re-elected. Most professors also toe the correctness line, as they too want to keep their jobs.

We need universities, though, to play their role as arenas for free expression of ideas (to embody universality). 

If the arena is taken over by the herd, the Professor Widdowsons of the world are driven into media outlets where their views are already accepted. In other words they're only allowed to talk to their followers, and the famous "bi-polarity" we are said to be living with only deepens. 

Professor Widdowson had already been censored and de-platformed at a different university for suggesting there are various ways of judging Canada's variety of residential schools. (In a variety run by different agencies and individuals with multiple objectives over more than a century, maybe some students did learn to read, write and do arithmetic -- as intended?) 

The two sides on that inflamed debate will never listen to each other in the community at large if they can't even do so at a university.  

(The same shouting-down technique was used by trans activists at McGill University on January 10th of this year: https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/shutdown-of-talk-at-mcgill-threatens-freedom-of-expression-in-canada-jamie-sarkonak-for-inside-policy/)

* Ramaswamy, V. Woke, Inc. Center Street, 2021 

Outing your rage -- Please put it back in the closet

Everyone seems to be raging: about race-resentment, gender-confusion, neuro-variance (which looks a lot like neuro-sameness), marginalization, and more. 

Are you among the outraged, or are you the rage-fatigued? Do you need a holiday from opinion, both others' and your own?

Outrage leads to cancel-culture, as moralistic and totalitarian as any Victorian rules, and today's "influencers" are as censorious as Victorians against non-compliance with their ideology.

The Victorian Age actually had an energetic sub-society of transgressors and free-thinkers. So, of course, do we: the non-PC. Victorian Age politicians were afraid to join the transgressors; so are ours. 

Social-media corporations make huge profits monetizing outrage, while politicians check the direction of public opinion so as to know how to follow it.

Regarding outrage the American investigative journalist/editor Ida Tarbell in the 1890s gave her staff at Maclure's Magazine some advice. The magazine's owner/boss (Sam Maclure) was driving staff mad with his erratic bi-polar behaviour. "Try not to mind", said Ida Tarbell, calmly sympathizing with everyone. So simple, so sane, such Stoic philosophy. 

"TNTM" is wisdom in today's unforgiving climate of opinion when everyone feels their tribe is getting the short straw and is full of ideological anger about it. Why is it so hard not to mind when other people's opinions differ from one's own? (Oh ... right ... it's because we're right and they're wrong ...) But you don't need to take your rage for an outing at the drop of every ideological hat. Not minding, once in a while, is such a relief. Be balanced, like Ida. Your identity will survive. 

 

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