Lionel Shriver | On sensitivity readers

good evening everyone and welcome back to act 2 of the Jumba ninth lecture with Lionel Shriver my name is Monica Wilkie and I'm a policy analyst at the Center for independent studies in the culture prosperity and civil society program it's so fantastic that all of you came out this evening to see so many new faces as well as old friends it's absolutely fantastic and thank you as well to everyone who sent in your questions we're going to be getting to those shortly but firstly Lionel as Tom mentioned you were on Q&A last night how did you cope with Q&A fine I made sure not to spend very long swatting up on the subjects that we didn't even end up talking about and I thought that the tenor of the conversation was was civilized and I liked that and it was interesting because ordinarily I would think of politics show would thrive on conflict and battle but I think I'm sick of it I'm sick of conflict in battle we have enough of it and I enjoyed the fact that everyone on that panel treated each other decently let each other finish their sentences and incredibly when we went back to the green room we were all still on speaking terms just to just to stick with QA for a moment because a issue that kept being brought up when you were talking about cultural appropriation was that we're not saying you can't write about characters that are a different race you just have to do it sensitively how do you write a character sensitively well of course the taboo doesn't doesn't prescribe sensitive sensitivity it it prescribes permission which is impossible to get and generally discourages writers from from venturing into the minds of people that they supposedly I guess can't conceivably understand and and it keeps people you're not supposed to steal experience that doesn't belong to you so I think that's an abridgment of what the taboo is all about and besides which sensitivity is in the eye of the beholder so you know in this environment you cannot get sensitive enough and it's been interesting to watch in the young adult fiction area that the number of the writers who have become either famous or notorious depending on whether you are one of their victims for persecuting other young adult fiction writers for violations of the progressive code these have been some of the same people who have been caught out violating the progressive code and have had basically bit their own bums and it's been hard not to take a certain Glee full satisfaction and watching them having having been taken down by their own methods and and by their own sensitivity so sensitivity is is no defense you can try terribly hard to to write characters of say a different race the way you think they want to be written about but you're never going to do it right if somebody is looking to catch you out they always will and that's the just brings us around to the fact that the very ambition to try to you know make people happy well it's just a it's it's a losing proposition and furthermore the the notion of writing a novel trying to satisfy a whole a spectacularly large array of special interest groups well that's a losing proposition - it's not why people should be writing novels that's certainly not the reason that I read them and so that the whole thing of of simply you know being determinedly sensitive it's a waste of time it's not even going to work and it's certainly not going to end up making a decent book on the issue of people being caught out someone wrote in a question and wanted to know is this in a way how cultural appropriation and some of the sensitivity readers will come to an end if everyone just keeps getting called out for transgressions it'll in a way wipe the slate clean eventually oh well I mean I do kind of like the notion of just putting all of these hard left fascists in a room and closing the door I mean you come back and 24 hours later and there just be this little puddle job done well I don't know if we can arrange that but we'll see what we can do just as well on the you've you brought up sensitivity readers you just want to briefly describe for those who don't know me what a sensitivity readers job actually is because I was flabbergasted when I found out what they actually do I gather there's a whole range of different kinds of sensitivity readers the kind you would predict you know of black or Native American or Muslim but they even have sensitivity readers for people with terminal illnesses though I guess those people have to be replaced on a regular that was bad and they go through manuscripts looking for anything that might might be offensive to these communities and I'm sure they always find them because that's that's the nature of the job if you are looking to be offended you always succeed and besides which these people have to justify their employments I gather it's a nice little earner so and he said it's a freelance job that and it's the publisher that generally gets the sensitivity readers so I gather that there are now there are now mainstream fiction writers not just why a fiction writers who sometimes independently choose to subject their own manuscripts to sensitivity readers out of paranoia in some ways you can't blame them it's not just novels and fiction writers that have fallen fallen afoul of this we we had someone writing a question to us specifically about comedians and how people have been caught out for for jokes and shows are we in danger of losing our sense of humor I'm not it's I'm very sympathetic with with comedians and I mean there were there was a comedian in the UK who was exposed the fact that he was subject at one it's one of the major universities in order to appear he was asked to sign promised that he wouldn't make fun of a whole list of groups and of course there was no one left to make fun of when you were through it the West aside from Briggs at supporters and he refused to sign it and I admired that and you know I think this is another area where it's the it's it's the comedians themselves that have to keep preserving their right to tell funny jokes even about things that are a little risque in the terms of the time those are the jokes that are funny after all it's usually the ones that are a little dangerous that make you f the most and you know the comedians have to be brave and go ahead and make the jokes and we have to be brave and be willing to laugh at them but if you're required to sign a waiver or conditions before you perform in a comedy gig or before you write a novel what are people going to have to do that just to perform their art if you want to perform comedy you have to do if you want to write a novel if they refuse then they're not going to get a comedy gig they're not going to get published well I mean that's why this stuff is important if it were just a matter of taste I don't think it would matter and you know we could all sort ofto you know we could go to the club that has the comedian's that we like that who are you know all the all the jokes aren't strictly politically correct it's not like that and that's you know that's why we're talking about this stuff because it has implications for real people's lives real people's livelihoods there have been a lot of people who've been sacked over the various sensitivities that were were we've been alluding to so yeah it's not that simple to solve so I don't I don't want to get up appearance and and be aphoristic and you know rah rah and if we're all brave everything will be fine it's not the case and especially since a lot of the craziness and conformity to hard left opinion is located in people my age administrators people who have real power who are terrified of violating present sensibilities and want to appeal to the young and don't want to get themselves into trouble so they are the ones who are probably guilty of enforcing this code of conduct then the young people that we are sometimes a little too merciless with you know the whole snowflake thing it's in the universities the biggest problem is now located not in the students but in the administrations but as you as you said in your remarks you you had a friend who works at Columbia and they said that there doesn't occur to their students not to view works in identity politics terms so hasn't this gone all the way down through to younger generations and they're gonna be getting publishing jobs and and working in those roles yeah there is definitely a danger of its being perpetuated that it that it this way of thinking gets handed down I think it is being handed down I mean every year there's a new class in a university that graduates and it's replaced by another class and there's there's still all in abundance being taught this same way of thinking it's a very rigid way of thinking and it's a way of looking at the world that I find depressing you know fundamentally identity politics has a way of looking at both the present and the past as exclusively a representation of power relationships between groups it's it's that simple and it's also it's it's not only a way of looking at at art and and history and present politics but also individual people which I find especially offensive because it flattens out everyone's identity into a group membership and it's not the way I think about people it's not the way think about myself it's not the the way I think about character which is crucial to my occupation but you know we're all concerned with character this is not just some fiction writer jag we're all concerned with our own characters and and with characters and people's around us and I would hope that most of us don't reduce ourselves and others to our race or or to whether or not we're disabled or our gender you know I don't give a toss about my gender I'm not even a very good feminist because being a woman is not especially important to me and I I am interested in getting out of all the little boxes into which I was born so you know I was born a American no one asked me on I was born in the the American South which is even weirder and I immediately you know as soon as I came of age I wanted to get out of there obviously I was born white and female but for me these are confinements and and I want to break free of them I moved to Britain I mean I've lived most of my life outside the United States so you know I concede I'm American I have stopped trying to live it down I accept it but I have tried to broaden myself my sense of self and my world and to me that's a natural impulse and this this impulse to instead stuff yourself and other people into these little pigeon holes these little boxes and to you know I just I think it's impoverished and I think it's an it's an ugly way to view the world and and I oppose it with every bone in my body [Applause] on the point about how we now view and consume art we had a question which I thought was fantastic is do we need to re-instill particularly in young people a love of art and novels and if so how do we do that well I do think it is important to emphasize that art is not primarily about virtue and that is completely lost on the current generation and it's frankly must be lost on a lot of their teachers as well and I am i find it be fooling why people would go to art thinking that that's what it's for and why would you go to art for moral instruction when I go when I read a novel or go watch a movie it's not the same impulse is going to Sunday school actually I have no impulse to go to Sunday school and I am i I really profoundly cannot understand why this why people want art just to to to lecture on on how to be good you know there's a there's actually a wonderful Nick Hornby novel called how to be good have any of you read it it's it takes the mickey out of the urge to virtue it's about somebody who has decided that he's going to be good and of course then he he becomes intolerable and I like that premise it's a little mischievous how do you how how do you how do you wake people up and say well that's not what this is that's not what this stuff is about and if and and also goodness is not that simple if we're really talking about you know what it means to live a good life what are what is the right thing to do in a given situation you know in real life goodness isn't obvious it's not simple it's not a matter of just walking around being against racism I mean how how how to make a lot of determinations in your life how to put together a successful society how to be a member of successful society how to be a member of a successful family you know it's not simple and one of the things that art teaches you is that complexity I don't know if you really read great books or watch you know great movies you get that you get the the pain of life the difficulty of life the contradictions of it that's what art is for not this cookie cutter kind of this is good and this is bad it's that's it's boring in it but it's also not real it's not real life you just described it as people going to art for morality is that possibly the reason behind the move to of cancel culture in that if artists have transgressed in their personal life or in their work than their work is scrubbed erased from history well I'm alarmed on a number of fronts about this canceled culture stuff I did an essay for Harper's on this which basically said okay artists are not perfect they can be caught out for various sins may be political may be sexual but isn't it cruel and unusual punishment to rescind their life's work on top of preventing them from producing anything more and that is the direction that we have been traveling that increasingly when an artist in any field has been discredited then their work is withdrawn from the artistic marketplace and I don't think that's fair another thing is that it's fair to the Creator but you know perhaps even more importantly it's not fair to the arts consumer it is I mean I'm really annoyed that I still haven't been able to see Louis CK's last movie you know it's never been put out because he can't keep his zipper up well you know what I'm sorry he's an exhibitionist I'd watch my back if he were in the room but but I want to see the movie I think he's funny and the same things happened to Woody Allen and Woody Allen hasn't admitted to anything or been convicted of anything there's no evidence he's been thoroughly investigated by the police twice there's no suggestion that there's anything to this story about his daughter and and having somehow assaulted her when she was seven there's and yet just because we're in a cultural moment that we're supposed to believe women you know kiss his career is very close to over Amazon Amazon retracted of something like a - movie deal and not they're not put I I don't know that whether he's even abled continue to make films this is crazy and again you know I'm a main problem with Woody Allen is the his last movies haven't been very good but I'd rather criticism what criticized him on that level and I just I think this whole this whole tendency to eliminate people it's very Soviet you know it is it is it is what they did in the Soviet Union you you were you were sent to the gulag or you know they're in Mao's China lots of people were just disappeared yes so it's not there's plenty of precedent for this stuff and one of the problems is that the people who are promoting this approach to disagreement or disapproval are also a historical and do not know anything about Stalinism or maoism don't know anything about the Khmer Rouge don't even especially know anything about McCarthyism and so they don't recognize what that impulse is and what historical implications the expression of that impulse has had in the past do you think there are any circumstances in which it would be justifiable to cancel an artist works but if they were convicted of a crime for example no I don't think that's what we do when people commit crimes if someone commits a crime a real crime then we put them in jail but we don't bust into their house and and smash up their apple pie that they made last night because this is you know somehow the fruit of the poison tree or something and we can't you know we don't we don't destroy everything they've ever made in their life that was good even if they did something bad in jurisprudence that's not the punishment that this artistic punishment is without prejudice at precedent aside from in that Soviet sense that it's not what we do it's not how we punish criminals so no I would not cancel anybody just on the issue of people not knowing history in your novels you've you've often even the even though they're fiction you always have an element of of the nonfiction of the realism and a good question to illustrate this is in the mandibles you envision a this is a question from an audience member you envision a world in a state of financial collapse given events in the US is fiction going to become fact I'm a little worried about this impending financial correction I mean I wrote that novel because I was genuinely worried about the stability of the world financial system given its degree of debt and I'm specifically concerned with sovereign debt we're you know in era where Western governments in particular are under increasing pressure from entitlement programs given you know that we have the famously aging population so that the pressure on government budgets is only going to get worse and yet we're starting from a point of fantastic mind-blowing sovereign debt and I don't see where we're in all this that money gets paid back I mean we're just making it bigger and bigger nobody ever makes it smaller nobody nobody ever says well this year you know let's save a little and pay down the debt nobody ever pays down the debt anymore so I just don't see how that sustained of I don't see why there's not a certain point at which either nobody everyone at once loses faith that that money is ever going to be returned or the central banks themselves announce that they're wiping the balance sheet I actually had a conversation with an economist at in Byron Bay at this the concilium conference just this last week who said that he he did expect that for example the Federal Reserve as as likely at some point simply to cancel the debt and he said didn't seem to think that that would have any any effect on anything I beg to differ so that yeah that really makes me anxious and it makes me anxious because I have a few assets because I'm getting older and I'm going to need those assets and it also makes me anxious for the frankly for the stability of civilization and if you want to know how things go when money falls apart by the mandibles [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Centre for Independent Studies

Views: 34,929

Keywords: Centre for Independent Studies, CIS, Identity Politics, Culture, Cultural Appropriation, Cultural Appreciation, Literature, Lionel Shriver, Writers, Authoritarianism, Social Justice Warriors, Political Correctness, Sensitivity, Hypersensitivities, Shriver, author blm issues, Lionel shriver on writing books, problems for writers, sensitivity readers, offensive authors, offensive writers, too easily offended, i'll write what i please, shriver will write what she wants

Id: AEgnn2j5MiQ

Length: 27min 24sec (1644 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2019