Last week, Tyler Cowen collected some graphics by David Rozado on his blog Marginal Revolution. wokism He is featured in the New York Times and his first conclusion is that it is starting to decline from the peaks reached during his presidency in 2011. donald trump. Also, a few days ago, the great Canadian writer Margaret Atwood told a Spanish medium, cancellation is basically a form of authoritarianism. These kinds of totalitarian ideologies respond to the moralizing discourses of new identity lefts and nationalisms, above all because they are associated with a previously untamed right or with different churches and religious sects. There seems to be nothing new under the sun, and over the centuries dogmatic impositions have been and continue to be constant in human history, like any form of contempt of conscience and domination of one over the other. The goal is to rewrite us, to make us say what we didn’t say or didn’t want to say. We take the last example from the work of Roald Dahl, one of the greatest children’s novelists of all time. I say the last one, because it was certainly not the first, and it has become an increasingly common practice: scanning texts to purge them of anything deemed inappropriate to the current sensibility, though this sensibility is really only a small but very active minority.
I don’t know what bothers the editors. dahlas funny as it is ironic, as poignant as it is clever; but easy to imagine: freedom of thought. Indeed, the fanatics are still troubled by freedom’s childish laughter, but also by its accusatory finger: the same finger that exposed the emperor’s nudity in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story. They are also disturbed by what is pure beauty in art, not subject to any ideology, but a reflection of a deeper, elusive and mysterious human reality. Because the critics who dare rewrite a book – and now Anglican theologians are also talking about making a new version of the Bible from a gender perspective – they are political commissioners reaching out to museums. putting art at the service of powerwhile applauding their own barbarism, redefining the past with the intention of expelling from the present everything they cannot tolerate; or legislative commissioners who decide which monuments deserve protection and which do not.
Finally, social pressure prevented censorship in texts. dahl and the fact that the New York Times and other progressive media began to reduce the evocative content of his speech suggests that a limit perhaps one would not want to cross has been reached. And these societies can be shaped, but only up to a point. Because deep down, no one wants to lose their freedom completely. We too. And it’s only a matter of time before that irrepressible laughter of freedom will definitively dispel the strange arrogance of the times we live in.