Can the Good Guys Win the Culture War?

Sapir Journal ^ | Autumn 2022 | Lionel Shriver

[Twotone]

Multiple pieces in my nonfiction collection out this fall, Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction, take issue with what began as “political correctness gone mad” in the 1990s, but was more recently tagged “identity politics,” morphed into “cancel culture,” and morphed again into “Wokism” (a dizzying linguistic turnover that took place across only five years). By the time the collection was being copyedited, I found a few of these essays’ observations over-obvious.

Mind, they were anything but obvious at the time: that progressives have become illiberal, authoritarian, and hostile to free speech; that left-wing speech codes corrupt readable, original prose; that a taboo against “cultural appropriation” binds the artistic imagination and potentially reduces fiction to memoir. While these and similar assertions remain sound, readers in 2022 are unlikely to fall off their chairs. Perhaps such centrist truisms are well on their way to lame — a prospect that cheers me no end.

What my audience may fail to note is the dates. I staked out uncompromising opposition to the ludicrous “cultural appropriation” prohibition in September 2016 — barely a year into the current period during which identity politics has been revved into overdrive. I enjoyed little ideological company when I told an audience in Brisbane that month,

Not only as writers but as people, surely we should seek to push beyond the constraining categories into which we have been arbitrarily dropped by birth. If we embrace narrow group-based identities too fiercely, we cling to the very cages in which others try to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our notion of who we are, and in presenting ourselves as one of a membership, a representative of our type, an ambassador of an amalgam, we ask not to be seen.

[aimhigh]

What is the end result of 165,000,000 voting sinners?