Moral panic, anyone?
Back in the 1950s, Americans convinced themselves that comic books were subverting our nation’s youth. The Seduction of the Innocent, proclaimed a famed psychologist cited in Brown v. Board. Senate hearings followed, treating the public to Jeffersonian exchanges like:
[Senator Estes] Kefauver: You have blood coming out of her mouth.
[Comic publisher William] Gaines: A little.
Kefauver: Here is blood on the axe. I think most adults are shocked by that.
Regulation was threatened. Comic publishers caved to the moral panic, promulgating the Comics Code Authority. “In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds,” it declared. Another provision, sure to send every ten year old straight to his parents’ dictionary, prohibited scenes of “depravity, lust, sadism, masochism.” And: “Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.”
We think we’re better than that today. But we’re not, and Adam Szetela has the goods. Change violence and sex to intolerance and racism, throw in an army of grifter “sensitivity readers” and social media scolds and you’ll think twice before proclaiming I never would have in the face of a McCarthyite mob.
Szetela’s biography—Ph.D from Cornell’s Department of Literatures; visiting fellow at Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism—does not suggest a maiden book calling out a morally challenged, uber-woke publishing industry. But Szetela, like “luxury beliefs” psychologist Rob Henderson and a certain best-selling author now one heartbeat from the White House, was not raised in privilege. His Dad, Szetela writes, “blew out his back and knees on the job.” Mom washed dishes in an old folks home. “I’ve always been involved in combat sports,” he told Quillette’s Zoe Booth. “Wrestling was my thing when I was younger… folk style and Greco-Roman. I also did powerlifting, competed in that, and was very into bodybuilding.”
Possibly all this informs Szetela’s depiction of an inbred, and increasingly overbred, literary world whose identitarian obsessions impact what we read, and much for the worse. It likely contributes to Szetela’s notably muscular prose, take no prisoners argumentation, and clear-eyed focus on how today’s publishers privilege what they call identity over class. Among the results: works that reinforce stereotypes, deny the very “lived experience” they claim to prize, and, worst of all, bore readers.
American publishing is the surplus elite industry par excellence. Too many MFAs, not enough Brooklyn flats. Today’s Big Five conglomerate publishers are a petri dish for Ivy League economic resentments, social insecurities, and determination to remake society through top-down enforcement of seminar room “social justice.” Emerging from hothouse English seminars where chance remarks are taken for existential personal threats, junior publishing house employees have convinced themselves literature is precisely the place to combat racism, homophobia, and the full spectrum of intolerance. Some might consider it a tad self-aggrandizing when a junior Editorial Assistant likens a sensitivity review to desegregating a lunch counter, but if one does believe this—and much of today’s cultural capital depends on believing it—then extreme measures are justified against books that cause “harm.”
This nonsense first took root in the world of YA, literature originally intended for young adults ages 12–18 but in this age of declining literacy increasingly marketed to adults, who comprise nearly 70% of its audience. Even so, the need to prevent harm has spread to what remains of adult and literary fiction. Szetela quotes a senior publishing figure:
If Lolita was offered to me today, I’d never be able to get it past the acquisition team—a committee of thirty-year-olds, who’d say, ‘If you publish this book, we will all resign.’
The rot, of course, begins in the universities, with their parched, deterministic concept of identity. At Harvard, people who share a racial, ethnic, or sexual identity all must think and act the same. Transposed to literature, all fictional characters of a given identity must think and act the same. They must be authentic. Otherwise, they cause harm, and, like any communicable disease, the books that carry them must be suppressed and their authors banished from the community of letters, a task greatly eased by Book Tok and other algorithm driven social media.
Much of This Book is Dangerous focuses on how those banishments follow the inexorable path of previous moral panics, be they Salem witches, McCarthy-era dissenters, or the aforementioned purveyors of Action Comics and similar threats to the republic.
Szetela does not address the antics of today’s Free Palestine movement, but attentive readers easily will trace the parallels. The frenzy over a dangerous book begins on social media accounts “manufactured for the sole purpose of crating the social pressure needed to force people to conform.” Conformists spread the contagion, whether flashmob netizens who, without having read the offending book, post thousands of 1-star Goodreads reviews, or college students who can identify neither the river nor the sea. Given the gravity of the supposed danger, any level of rhetorical excess is justified. When an undergraduate suggested that a YA (again, ages 12–18) novel was not the best choice for her university’s common read, the bestselling author herself screenshotted the objection to her quarter million followers: “I’m having a really hard time right now… this is just mean and cruel.” A number of bestselling authors then piled on, until the scrum culminated in another author tweeting of the undergrad “F- that f-ing b-ch!” To which a leading YA author followed on: “Can I add a few more choice words to [author’s] brilliance… f- that RAGGEDY A- f-ing b-ch!”
Szetela draws the requisite parallels to Fahrenheit 454 (“a book is a loaded gun in the house next door”) and 1984 (2-minutes hate) but the measure of this real-world social degradation campaign’s success is this: Nearly every Big Five publishing executive who spoke with Szetela for this book only would do so anonymously.
With the commercial and personal consequences of an inauthenticity charge so great, publishers now require literal sanction for fictional characters not identified as straight, and white, and male. So who does the kashering? Enter the sensitivity reader.
Who exactly qualifies for this august role? Since the underlying premise of the exercise is that all who share an identity feel and behave the same, it follows that literally any individual of the right identity can do the job. Should an author include in her book a female two-spirit character, she will be obliged—on her own dime—to engage a female, two-spirit sensitivity reader to dictate character and plot changes required to earn the hechsher. At this point in the social panic, a new market even has emerged for sensitivity readers for sensitivity readers.
All this amounts to a shakedown mob, of course, with the proceeds serving social justice by lining the pockets of appropriately identitied entrepreneurs. (“Nice book you got there. Shame if a million Instagram posts make it unsalable.”) It also undercuts the very diversity it allegedly champions. “In the past,” Szetela writes, “Jim Crow racists came up with rules for black people. In the present, sensitivity readers come up with rules for fictional black people.” It hardly bears mentioning that characters following template rules are boring and books stuffed with them more boring still.
“I told the author that the first thing she needed to reconcile was, how did this black girl get into national parks?” one sensitivity reader informed their author. “Historically, black people weren’t allowed to visit national parks, so going to national parks is not a thing we do, as a group. I wrote to her that if this little girl loves to camp, you need to figure out how that happened, how that passion was stoked, how her parents and grandparents felt about it. Or you have to make her white.”
Szetela rightly decries this “literary minstrel show.” “If one were to ask a black coworker,” he continues, “‘What do blacks eat for dinner?’ they might be reported to HR. If they pay a sensitivity reader for an answer, they will be lauded for trying to ‘get their story right.’”
If all this constrains today’s writers, it positively corrupts today’s readers, and tomorrow’s. When we train students to “disrupt” rather than closely read a text, we turn reading into “a wack-a-mole game of spot the ‘problematic’-ism.” One might add that corrupted legacy media outlets have already done the same to journalism.
If politics is downstream from culture, what happens in publishing will have consequences beyond a decline in the quality of American letters and the migration of American readers to other forms of entertainment and edification. Again as with journalism, the prestige colophon no longer denotes what it once did. It is incumbent on the educated reader to seek out works by more intellectually resilient but less widely distributed houses like Wicked Son, Europa, and Skyhorse.
Adam Szetela is to be congratulated for laying out in glorious detail yet another arena where champions of free thought and intellectual rectitude must engage to protect our country and our culture.
Michael Jay Friedman holds a doctorate in US Political and Diplomatic History. He served over two decades at the United States Department of State. Views expressed here are his own and not that of the US Government. He reviews books on his Substack, “The Dreyfusard.”