Now, humour operates in lots of ways (I can’t believe I’m writing this, but here we are), one of which is through something called hyperbole, from the Greek, meaning: get a grip. This joke is funny because of the contrast between this teenage girl’s minor inconvenience and the horrors suffered by Anne Frank and her family. There’s also a kind of meta-funniness going on too, I think — the joke seems to invoke the way we cope with the unthinkable horror of the Holocaust by making silly jokes about attics and Anne Frank. The word “we” in that sentence is problematic, probably, because I am not Jewish but, well, I think Anne Frank’s work belongs to the world — and for the sin of that thought, I shall begin preparing my own hide-away.

I wonder if a way to deal with the endless contretemps around problematic language in literature at the moment is to offer the reader two versions of the work they wish to read. The first is the draft produced by the writer with nothing on her mind but the business of getting a good story onto the page. The second is the version put through the filter of sensitivity readers who will remove anything that could possibly be interpreted by any group as a slight. That way, I think, everyone wins: those who believe literature should deal with how people really are — problematic, offensive, foul-mouthed — can read about that and revel in their damnation; and those who think literature should show us the higher ideals through characters who never make dodgy jokes can have their safe clean fun too – although, we can never be too sure of this safety since, according to Publisher’s Weekly, this book had been vetted by sensitivity readers and still the joke made it through.

This dual-edition model has the advantage of creating employment for the hordes of people who wish to work in publishing — and the work itself is likely to be satisfying for graduates trained to locate insensitivities in the texts they encounter. Obviously, it will cost the publishers money, but they are mostly celebrating record profits at the moment so they can afford it — and I suspect they will be extremely grateful to throw some money at the problem of these endless social media blow-ups. Indeed it will probably prove less costly in the long run than having to deal with the reduced efficacy of the PR departments who are surely in some kind of group therapy at the moment (I really hope the companies are paying for this because publishing salaries do not stretch so far as to cover the cost of the kind of mental robustness needed in the frontline of these wars).

The alternative, I guess, is that all we are allowed to read will be campus novels about young people with lovely politics arguing sexily before falling into bed with one another. I have no problem with such novels — but I’m not sure if that’s all I want to read. It seems to me that we are dealing with a gap between how people behave in “the real world” and how people in cultural institutions like publishing houses wish they would behave. Anyone who has ever worked in a bar or a McDonald’s or a factory or even a school or hospital will have heard language that would make the most hardened sensitivity reader faint clean anyway. Which means it’s great that we have so few literary novels depicting those kind of environments nowadays — I mean, can you imagine?

Anyway, it doesn’t matter because the joke has been scrubbed out. The author has asked her publisher to remove it from the text of the novel for future printings and from all existing digital versions. So we all win — earlier, problematic versions of the text will likely circulate on eBay for those who think they can handle it, and everyone else will get a safe reading experience. All we need now is for publishers to provide that option to readers from the start, which has the additional advantage of giving us insight into how many unclean readers are out there, and — if these readers mostly purchase their books online — a handy way to keep track of them and their dirty reading habits.

Suggested reading

Books won't save you

By Sarah Ditum

I am honing in, perhaps unfairly, on a particularly egregious example here: I know that as I write, any number of books with any number of dodgy jokes are going to press, brought into being by a solid understanding of the difference between author and character which seems to have failed Hilderbrand’s readers so fatally. Of course we know they understand this very well, but this is not about protecting readers from offence. It is really about incentives and how the discovery of offence in texts is richly rewarded by a social media where attention — of any kind, even for being wilfully, deliberately stupid — is the only currency.

But it is the fact that it is such a trivial joke in such a “trivial” genre that should concern us here. “Trivial” genres are the ones read by most people (though we in fiction publishing must always remember that most people do not read our books at all). Most of the fiction market is commercial and of that, at least 50% of it is digital — often low-priced ebooks depicting characters in settings many people enjoy reading about: schools, hospitals, police stations, helicopters, skyscrapers, Nantucket; that combination of ordinary life enhanced by high drama, romance or crime that has been the bread-and-butter of publishing for as long as anyone can remember.

Suggested reading

You can't silence D.H. Lawrence

By Frances Wilson

But now, even here, in the books that never win prestigious prizes, with authors who sell by the bucketload but are never heard of by readers who carry New Yorker tote bags and are sniffy about Amazon — myself first among them, I admit  — even here, if we are to be guided by the Hilderbrand example, it is no longer permissible to depict people talking as they actually talk. Be honest: how inclusive was your language the last time you had sex with a millionaire on a helicopter?

I know that in similar incidents there has been unease at publishing houses about text changes brought about due to social media pressure. And I understand here that it was the author’s decision: the upheaval, the anxiety, the potential damage to her brand just wasn’t worth it. This put me in mind of “Art’s Troubles”, a beautiful essay by Anthony Julius in the recent issue of Liberties, exploring the question of who, in this censorious age of ours, will stand up for the arts?

He astutely comments that the writer/artist will not do so: she is too busy making art, even if the art she is making — commercial romance novels — is usually ignored by the kind of people who read lofty essays in literary journals. As (some) publishing workers do read or at least pretend to have read these essays, I beg them to read Julius’s one and to consider as a slogan – for we all seem so very fond of slogans, all of a sudden, though sloganeering is the very antithesis of art-making – the following:

“Everything is a subject for art and literature; everything can be shown, whatever can be imagined can be described.”

It could even fit quite nicely on a Tote bag.

Inevitably, the woke press have been quick to condemn the new series. Just as these commentators have mastered the ability to divine the secret motives of their political opponents, they have also developed a form of clairvoyance which enables them to pronounce judgement on creative endeavours in advance of their existence. The Guardian has produced two hit pieces in quick succession to bewail the return of this ‘problematic’ show. An article for Glamour claims that Little Britain’s brand of humour is ‘dangerous’ and that we should be “leaving behind an era we should all be ashamed of”. In a further twist, a source at the BBC has apparently said that a new series has been ‘ruled out’ because the show is too ‘offensive’. The claim has since been denied by friends of Lucas and Walliams but, if it turns out to be true, that means that the new series of Little Britain will have been announced, denounced and cancelled in the space of five days.

This tells us a great deal about the cultural climate we now occupy, one in which social media can catalyse a flurry of competing storms. Offence is a contemporary form of currency, and declarations of virtue are deemed an adequate substitute for virtuous acts. Little Britain was never to my taste, but there has never been a greater need for mainstream comedy that teases the limits of our tolerance. When the new series was mooted, the headline in The Sun posed the question: “Will it fall foul of PC killjoys?” The answer was never really in doubt.

Suggested reading

Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

One of the many problems with the identitarian Left is an apparent inability to assess art or comedy by anything other than ideological standards. A film is judged successful if it is sufficiently diverse and sends a positive message about social justice. This is why Avengers: Endgame was lambasted for its ‘fat shaming’ by The Guardian, in spite of Marvel’s desperate efforts at woke posturing. Ideologues demand purity, and mistakes are not to be brooked.

It is difficult, therefore, to see how a Little Britain that even remotely resembles the original series could possibly be forgiven were it to be broadcast today. Perhaps the solution will be to modify the targets according to the prevailing intersectional creeds. For all their censuring of ‘bullying’ comedy that ‘punches down’, the woke are happy to indulge in the most vicious forms of bullying so long as the targets are approved. Ageism is fine, for example, because elderly people voted for Brexit and tend to subscribe to outlandish and outdated belief systems. Many, for instance, insist that there are only two genders, or that obesity can lead to health problems. Whatever you say, boomers.

Attacks on working class people are also acceptable, of course. This is a consequence of the social justice movement’s poisonous influence on the left. Not only has it rehabilitated racial thinking and abused the principle of diversity in a way guaranteed to foster division, it has failed to prioritise its traditional mission of redressing economic inequality. In the early days of Little Britain, commentators for The Guardian and The Independent would often cite the character of Vicky Pollard — the tracksuit-clad teenage mother who swapped her baby for a Westlife CD — as an example of how Lucas and Walliams were ‘punching down’ at the oppressed. Owen Jones devoted a substantial part of his book Chavs to criticising what he perceived to be Little Britain’s damaging stereotypes.

Suggested reading

Drinking in the madness of social media

By Gareth Roberts

Yet many of the leftists who took umbrage at such characterisations at the time are the same who now routinely demonise the working class in the name of progress. In today’s context, Vicky Pollard could work well as a satire of the kind of attitudes held by prominent left-wing columnists who dismiss working class people as ‘gammons’. For all their pretence that the slur was aimed at affluent Little Englanders, in practice it was mostly reserved for white Brexit voters on the very lowest incomes.  In trendy metropolitan circles, it is now de rigueur to deride the working class as stupid and suggestible creatures, fuelled by race hatred, who can’t stop themselves from voting the wrong way.  If Vicky Pollard does return, we might well expect to see her gloating about Brexit to her gammony friends, or spending her dole money on a tattoo of Boris Johnson.

And what of the other characters? How might they be sanitised to avoid the ire of a new generation of intersectional Mary Whitehouses? The padded bodysuits of Bubbles and Desiree would be considered fat-shaming; the masculine ‘ladies’ Emily and Florence would be deemed transphobic; the mail order bride Ting Tong would be dismissed as legitimising racist stereotypes. Caricatures are always offensive to somebody.

But a new series of Little Britain also has the potential to take aim at the intolerance of the identitarian Left and ‘cancel culture’, should the creators be inclined to take the risk. The character of Daffyd, the “only gay in the village”, was based on the type of gay man who is obsessed with victimhood, determined to detect prejudice even where it doesn’t exist. In the intervening years, overt homophobia has become far less common, while sensitivity to homophobia has increased. This means that the joke actually works better in today’s context, because the victim-centred social justice movement has spawned innumerable Daffyds, all desperate to denounce the homophobes of their imagination. But this is also why in a 2020 reimagining of Little Britain, Daffyd would probably be the first for the chop.

“Humour normalises thoughts and behaviours,” writes the author of Glamour magazine’s pre-emptive critique, “and we definitely don’t need bigotry any more normalised then [sic] it already is.” No evidence for this assertion is forthcoming. Like so many woke mantras, the idea that there is a causal link between entertainment and public behaviour is simply taken on faith. Comedy can flourish in this kind of puritanical atmosphere if comedians are willing to subvert the new dogmas. It will be interesting to see whether or not Little Britain makes it back to our screens and, if so, whether it will resist or embrace the new oligarchy of social justice.

Andrew Doyle will be touring the UK with Douglas Murray later this year for a live political discussion show “Resisting Wokeness”. Details available at resistingwokeness.com.

1. Thou shalt get there first at all costs

If there’s a joke begging to be made, a hot take screaming out to be delivered, an unsourced and inflammatory rumour to be passed on or an unfortunately-worded tweet to be screengrabbed and retweeted, what are you going to do? Stop to consider whether it’s tasteful, decent, proportionate and/or based on anything like reality? HELL NO. Get that sucker up before the next person does and soak up all those sweet retweets.

2. Thou shalt snitch-tag where possible

What profiteth it a man that he seeth his neighbour’s name taken in vain, and he passeth up the opportunity to let his neighbour know all about it? It profiteth him nothing either way, if we’re honest. But it giveth him either a solid lol, a thrill of prurience or a little glow of sanctimony if he catcheth person A slagging off person B and taggethperson B’s handle into his reply, knowing that it will All Kick Off more or less immediately.

3. Thou shalt quote-tweet thy victims

If you disagree with someone on Twitter, it’s not enough simply to reply to them stating your difference, like a person having a civilised conversation. Instead you go for the equivalent of standing up at a restaurant table and bellowing what they said in outrage, then running out onto the street to shout what an idiot they are to passers-by. With a bit of luck – especially if you have 200,000 drooling maniacs following you and your victim has 49 gentle flower-arranging types – their mentions will be dogpiled by neo-Nazis and you can have a good laugh about ruining their day.

Oh wow. Actual wow. So finally we have a rule on quote tweeting. Quote tweeting is fine if the quote tweeter decides that their followers are well behaved.

And yet every single time you quote tweet me, which you do obsessively, I get piled on, so how does that work?

— Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) July 2, 2018

4. Thou shalt seek offence

Yea, even unto the ninth generation. There are many creative ways to do this. You can make sure that a piece of racist language or an offensive image goes hurtling round the globe as a by-product of your need to show everyone how earnestly you disapprove. You can trawl through the social media history of political enemies in search of drunken or “problematic” posts. You can wilfully extract a single word or phrase from context, take a figure of speech (especially a violent one) literally, deafen yourself to irony and purposely misunderstand jokes. The main thing is to make sure you supply not a shred of imaginative sympathy or benefit of doubt to anyone outside your tribe.

5. Thou shalt humblebrag

It’s not all about making life a misery for others. Social media is also there to inflate your own fragile sense of self-worth by telling your followers how wonderful you are. But not in a boastful way. Much better to make them hate you by coyly retweeting praise. “So this happened…” you might say above a photo of you with an armload of Oscars, but with a blushing emoji to show how incredibly humble and relatable and surprised you are. Or you retweet over-the-top praise from minor celebrities – but with a comment saying you can’t BELIEVE how kind they are to say that. #proud #blessed #humbled.

Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016

6. Thou shalt pick the scab

Once you’re in a hole, as Confucius did not say, keep digging. Never, never, walk away from the scene of a disaster. Never accept you’ve been misunderstood, or owned, or that the argument’s not worth having, shrug and walk away.  Rather, double down and double down again. Think of Richard Dawkins and his confiscated jar of honey, or the guy who (as far as I know he’s still at it) attempted to explain to the entire laughing internet why he was right about the name of the female external genitalia and the entire laughing internet was wrong.

7. Thou shalt thirst-trap

Nothing says “aren’t I attractive” like sending a picture of you looking attractive out into the world for zillions of strangers to gawp at. Young women! Men who go to the gym! Perhaps you have some lovely boobs you would like to share with the world. See your follower count soar, and then enjoy publicly shaming the creepy losers who slide into your DMs shortly afterwards. Especially satisfying to note when some middle-aged saddo makes clear they are trawling your feed by accidentally liking a fruity photo from three years ago.

8. Thou shalt make it about thou

Perhaps someone famous has died and you once met them. Perhaps you chance upon two people having a friendly conversation about a subject in which you’re interested and, despite one of them having written a book on it, you’re pretty sure you can help set them straight on a couple of things. Perhaps you’ve spotted someone feeling sorry for himself or herself about something that’s a bit like something that happened to you only not as bad. Why not reach out the hand of… making it all about you?

9. Thou shalt revel in the ratio

Let’s not caricature social media as being all about either showing off or humiliating other people. Sometimes it’s good just to sit back, keep your counsel and benefit from the experience and wisdom of others. That is, when somebody says something really, really stupid and obnoxious, and their post has earned 37,000 replies and a minuscule number of retweets that can confidently be ascribed to “fat thumb” errors by mobile users trying to reply, rejoice. They have been “ratioed”, and you have not. Feel free to add a reply saying: “Only here for the ratio”.

This President is better than Reagan! The Churchill of the 21st Century! He belongs on Mt Rushmore!

— Nick Adams (Alpha Male) (@NickAdamsinUSA) July 1, 2019

10. Thou shalt not be Piers Morgan

It is possible to go too far with all this stuff. If you ever find yourself opening a social media post with the word “BOOM!”, needily trolling young woman celebrities, or picking fights with random strangers about obscure menu items in bakeries, check the mirror. Do you look like Piers Morgan? If so, check your wallet. If it’s full of money and all the credit cards have Piers Morgan’s name on them, you are in breach of the tenth and most important commandment and must immediately delete your account.

St Edmund’s claimed that “Dr Carl had collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views. There was a serious risk that Dr Carl’s appointment could lead, directly or indirectly, to the College being used as a platform to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred, and bring the College into disrepute.”

With these moves, and its recently announced inquiry into the University’s association with the slave trade, Cambridge seems determined to signal its fealty to Left-modernism, or what African-American linguist John McWhorter calls the “religion of anti-racism”, the reigning ideology of our high culture.

What are Noah’s crimes? First, daring to attend a conference on intelligence research at University College London that was invitation-only and where some who study the putative association between race and intelligence were, apparently, present. Carl himself doesn’t endorse the race-IQ link, but he does defend scholars’ right to research in this area in pursuit of truth. That’s a distinction, between liberalism and the science of group differences, that is lost on the guilt-by-association mob.

The need for the event to be private should be obvious, given the hysterical reaction to it from radical students and staff that would accompany any open conference on such matters. This was not some secret plot to sterilise the unfit, but a serious symposium that had to convene in secret to avoid a lynching by the progressives.

Peruse Noah’s research profile on Google Scholar, which his social justice critics no doubt have not, and you will see that he has collaborated with numerous leading academics and written mostly on, well, intelligence research. Much of this is in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Plos One, and its findings are eclectic.

He has a striking number of publications for someone at his stage of career, which just might explain him getting the fellowship in the first place. His most cited article is – wait for it – ‘Verbal intelligence is correlated with socially and economically liberal beliefs’. Maybe the ‘woke’ inquisition would like to put that in their pipe and smoke it.

Further reading

Who let the thought police invade our universities?

By Julie Bindel

He has also, however, been unafraid to do research on the leftward tilt in academia – work which has been replicated by liberal researchers using other datasets. He has worked on the established field of stereotype accuracy, suggesting a connection between ethnic group crime rates and public attitudes toward groups immigrating to a country.

Academics should be allowed to have these conversations in pursuit of truth and theory-building, free from the kind of orthodoxy that once prevented Galileo from propounding his heliocentric view of the universe or Darwin from speaking of our evolution from apes.

I am not a free speech absolutist, but rather a rule-utilitarian – I believe there are other goals in a good society besides free expression. I would be willing to entertain a restriction on speech provided: a) there is a significant, empirically-demonstrable harm derived from a proper study by the college or its committee attempting to get at representative opinion; and b) this is sufficient in weight to override the extremely valuable rule of free speech which should only be violated when there is a very strong countervailing imperative. I don’t believe either condition is met here, despite what the college may believe.

What has occurred is an orchestrated putsch by an organised group of progressive fundamentalists who wield enormous influence in academia and the creative professions.

Let’s be clear on the harm standard that is used by Left-modernism to quash free enquiry. First, there are totemic “protected groups”, with racial minorities at the top, followed by sexual minorities and women, with all other disadvantaged categories (ie class, disability) essentially marginalised.

Second, any action or words that offend the most sensitive member of a sacred group, or the most sensitive member imaginable by a mind-reading progressive, is prohibited. With this ‘most sensitive’ standard in mind, there is an enormous incentive for Left-modernists to go out of their way to be offended or, in the lingo of social science, to engage in the social construction of offence. Evidence – in the form of a representative survey of the minority population, or even the campus minority population – is not provided.

Further reading

Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

Having been accosted by radicals in the past in the form of a Twitter mob and an open letter in December 2018, following the announcement of a debate with UnHerd, one of the things I undertook was to empirically test our assailants’ catastrophising claims. And when I surveyed minority opinion, I found what the large-scale data tells us: that minorities are more moderate than white liberals on racial issues and not easily offended. They simply don’t fit the fragile caricature painted by the social justice opportunists.

Whites are likewise unmoved by controversial debates: my data showed no change in their attitude toward protected groups when presented with the ‘offending’ title of our debate.

Students are also not as fragile as the Left-modernists like to claim. The Cambridge and Oxford Unions have both had Jordan Peterson to speak, with large crowds of interested students attending. I suspect most Cambridge students who care wish Peterson could reside at Cambridge for two months so they can hear and test his ideas.

When fundamentalists tried to no-platform me at the University of Bristol, students quietly urged the university not to do so because they are intellectually curious. Far from panicking in their beds, most students – whether from ‘protected’ groups or otherwise – are simply unaware of, or don’t care about, controversial speakers.

The battle for free enquiry won’t be won by converting progressive fundamentalists to reason. Those we need to focus on are the politically-correct herd of centre-Leftists and liberals in academia who dislike the radicals but believe, like the Emperor having new clothes, that their colleagues believe in the logic of no-platforming.

Like traders shorting a fundamentally-sound stock because they believe others will, the downward spiral of censorship will only end when academic authorities become convinced that the reputational cost of capitulation is higher than the momentary cost of annoying a few highly-networked activists.