I'm finding their examples hilarious, especially considering one of them is Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which the Oompa Loompas were originally African pygmies.
> I'm finding their examples hilarious, especially considering one of them is Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which the Oompa Loompas were originally African pygmies.
IIRC, that was done by the original author himself. That's far different than an anonymous committee quietly revising past works to conform to the current political line. I mean that's such a blatant parallel to a famous work of dystopian fiction that they should know better not to do it.
Though, I honestly look forward to a revised version of that famous work, revised to conform to modern sensitivities. IIRC, there's some out-of-fashion racial descriptions and the whole disapproving take on doctoring older works has to go.
I think that it's anti-black to de-racist-ify the past. Take it or leave it, but don't gaslight black people over the experience that they've had for the last century or four in relation to Europeans.
As far as I can tell, a major component of woke bowdlerization of the past seems to be finding depictions of black people and either eliminating them or making them conform to the idealistic stereotypes of modern white liberals. That's stacking stereotypes on stereotypes, and the truth of the black experience gets buried even deeper.
The way my grandmother spoke would be cut out of a modern novel as a racist stereotype.
I read an article last week where a DEI expert was angry about the new release of The Little Mermaid because it wasn't nearly racist enough; that 18th-century Caribbean people were friends and kind to each other no matter what their race or sex; it was unconscionable that history should be rewritten to leave out the allegedly horrible experiences being had by BIPOC in that place and time.
That's a symptom of trying to rewrite white stories and stick black people into them. It's the same process as trying to rewrite male stories with female protagonists. It's the creation of fictional pasts. If all we see is fictional pasts where black people are just white people with tans, and women are just pretty men, what are black people and women complaining about? They should have just tried harder.
And the reason we get these stories in this way is not because of anything related to wokeism, progressivism, DEI, or whatever buzzword you wanted use. It is because of risk averse capitalists. Disney knows a Black Little Mermaid is a safer investment than an original story with a Black protagonist so that is the version we get.
No, it is cynical, ignorant, and lazy, but I don't think it qualifies as racist. I would compare it to those people who like to claim they "don't see race". It isn't actually racist because it isn't discriminatory or putting one race above another. It is just ignoring something that often can't be ignored.
The original story was a fiction too and creates fictional past too. That exact same story with only males in it ... was a fiction. Those males never existed and never did any of those things. Variant of the same fictional story with a woman or a black person is ... exactly as fictional as original. The real world back then contained both men and women. None of them done the mythical things stories are about.
Modern reimagining of The Three Musketeers make Musketeers sound more honorable and noble then actual text. Some comedies make them sound incapable, clumsy and funny. Dumas politics was not pro-ancient regime and he actually makes it clear. Making that into super honorable flawless dudes is as much "changing past fiction" as if you slapped gender or race or made them eskimos. But somehow that is fine.
> If all we see is fictional pasts where black people are just white people with tans, and women are just pretty men, what are black people and women complaining about?
In general, they complain about how they are or were treated back in real world. They also complain about being depicted in fiction as dumb simpletons without agency and then people on discussion forums claiming that those dumb simpletons depictions somehow constitute historical reality.
It's like going through life with autism and being called "neurodiverse" as if you haven't lived with an active disability your whole life, you're just a little different from everyone else.
Back in the early 2000s I saw someone refer to a wheelchair-bound person as "handicapable". The disabled fellow ran over his foot lol.
Point being I think it's best not to minimize people's suffering. Acknowledge it, respect it, and try to move forward together.
I dont think of Autism (as someone who has it) as a disability - even though it does make me different (normal people and their societal norms are often baffling to me, but I still follow those norms to the extent I am able).
I don't want others to think of me as disabled either (though a little understanding might be nice when I fail to mask well enough).
Maybe the problem is how we treat the disabled, not the words we use to talk about disability?
Changing characters and their depictions is a thing that can be argued about, but there's definitely no need to print n-bombs in books printed in 2023.
In general, it's (IMHO) not needed to have centuries old books full of stereotypes in modern curricula. There are so many works that have been published in the last decades that provide far better diversity of all kinds than even a "de-racisted" historic book can. Modern authors, modern artists, modern composers and other artists deserve their shine in the spotlight as well - it's ridiculous how much of curricula is spent on stuff that happened or got created hundreds to thousands of years ago. We have to refocus education on modern events if we want a modern society.
And if you want something filled with racial or other stereotypes in curricula, ffs print it with commentary like we do with Hitler's "Mein Kampf" here in Germany. That is, coincidentally, the only way one is allowed to do a reprint in Germany due to copyright and anti-Nazi symbolism laws.
> but there's definitely no need to print n-bombs in books printed in 2023.
How can a word be a bomb?
And I'm still at a loss how in a supposedly post-enlightenment world, a single word can be so evil that you have to resort to code to refer to it, no matter in which context or even when you're quoting.
Yes, you shouldn't call people that way - and if you do, that is a clear sign of a racist mindset. But treating the word itself as some kind of forbidden symbol that must be purged from everything is not much better than medieval magical thinking.
> But treating the word itself as some kind of forbidden symbol that must be purged from everything is not much better than medieval magical thinking.
Nonetheless, the continued reproduction of that word makes it "acceptable" to be used, and every time affected persons have to read that, it's bad for them.
> The way my grandmother spoke would be cut out of a modern novel as a racist stereotype.
That’s nothing new sadly, especially in academia. It used to be considered proper literary form to “translate” how people actually spoke to “proper English” and you can imagine the demographic of the people doing the “translating.”
See for example Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" [1] about one of the last living former slaves in the US. It was published a few years ago nearly a century after it was written because the author refused to white wash the subject’s language and couldn’t get it published in her life time.
Hell that criticism could easily be leveled at some of the most popular western canon like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Barracoon is the greatest work of anti-slavery literature I've ever read. It wouldn't have been as effective if they'd removed his dialect. "Sometimes I think I die in my sleep when I dream bout my mama." I had tears in my eyes.
Except it's never a faceless authoritarian committee in practice.
It's one of two things:
The copyright holders are publishing new editions edited to modern sensibilities to maximize their profits by selling to a new audience.
The works are in the public domain, in which case anyone can edit up a new edition however they like, for fun or profit.
What's the alternative? We take away the right of copyright holders to publish new editions of their IP? We disallow people to edit works in the public domain?
An alternative: allow copyright holders to publish new editions but only if they 1) clearly label them as new, edited versions that are not the original and 2) make the unedited originals fully and completely available upon request, for a (truly) reasonable fee to anyone who requests access to them for whatever reason.
If these conditions aren't met within a reasonable timeframe, then (by law) the original version would automatically become fully (or partially) public domain. ("Partial" public domain would mean than anyone could make or distribute copies of the original version. The copyright holders would temporarily retain the exclusive right to make edited versions, until the work fully becomes public domain when the standard copyright term lapses. At that point anyone could make and distribute the original version or their own, edited versions.)
So should Bill Nye be required to keep publishing the original version of his book "Undeniable"? [Between the publication of the hardcover and softcover editions, he changed his views on GMO foods, and updated the relevant chapter.]
> So should Bill Nye be required to keep publishing the original version of his book "Undeniable"? [Between the publication of the hardcover and softcover editions, he changed his views on GMO foods, and updated the relevant chapter.]
Ideally, yes, but at a minimum he should provide a list of changes and their rationale(s) in the newer editions.
If he changed his views and then edited his book to only show his new viewpoint then absolutely yes.
If he edited his book to rebut his own argument and lays out the case then maybe not but it should be stated in the forward that the change was made.
We are moving forward into a time where media is only digital and can be changed at will, it is important to establish a system where when we make changes we record them and also why we made the changes.
If we do not, the only future is one where information is as ethereal as the morning dew and subject to the zeitgeist of the times.
Key word here is that HE changed his mind and updated the chapter.
If someone else changes the text on a book from a dead author... how do you know the author would have liked that?
I remember a while ago I was reading on a stage play that's supposed to be only 4~5 men (no women on the play), and the - now dead writer - specified that this should never be changed. And some ppl try to do women-only, or mixed cast, and then the writer's estate sues and tries to intervene...
I honestly expected many more people to push back on this point, and not jump whole-heartedly to the extreme that even the original author should not be allowed to change a work once published.
The only real counter-argument I can make to the position that the author can edit his works but his heirs cannot is that the author chooses his heirs; the author could have instead chosen to will his works into the public domain after his death, or establish a trust or foundation with a strict mandate to republish his works in their original form while returning the profits to his heirs.
It's not a particularly strong argument -- many authors may not have the resources or foresight to make such provisions, and you could just as easily insist on authors who do wish their heirs to manage their works and not simply profit from them make explicit declarations on that point -- which is why I lead with the more extreme case of an author editing his own work.
If someone thinks that authors shouldn't be allowed to update their own works, it's a bizarre position to me, but they've already accepted it, so I'm not sure what rhetoric to use to discuss it further.
I can at least talk to you about whether it's reasonable for eg Brian Herbert or (the now-late) Christopher Tolkien to continue to exercise editorial control over their fathers' works, or under what conditions a foundation could be established for the duration of the 90-years-post-author-death copyright the US currently uses.
If it's permissible for Dr Seuss's widow to inherit editorial control of her husband's work along with the copyright, can she pass that control to Dr Seuss Enterprises; if not, could Dr Seuss have established it before his death?
(Personally I think the other reply was better, in stating that it is arrogant to assume that the author's heirs do not know his wishes better than us.)
> If it's permissible for Dr Seuss's widow to inherit editorial control of her husband's work along with the copyright, can she pass that control to Dr Seuss Enterprises; if not, could Dr Seuss have established it before his death?
I guess the widow (or if they are still alive, the editors that worked with the author when he was alive) is the person that probably knows the author best to know if they would've liked their work to be updated or not. Or at least, make decisions on allowing changes that can have impact on how the author is seem (e.g. progressist, non-racist, sexist or not sexist, etc...).
My problem is when someone totally unrelated starts making changes, even in cases where author was explicit that they would never want the gender of their characters changed, and people go ahead and still want to change the gender
> If someone else changes the text on a book from a dead author... how do you know the author would have liked that?
There's an obvious counterargument: how do we know [better than the author's estate] that a dead author would have been so committed to the retention of a particular stereotype or word that has acquired different connotations that they'd have angrily refused editors' suggestions they change it a bit for the next edition? In the cases discussed here, it seems particularly unlikely - would the bloke who accepted the suggestion that the workforce of African pygmies he imagined should stop being characterised as African pygmies really feel the purity of his writing was being destroyed if an even later revision made the comparatively minor switch to describing them as "people" rather than "men"?
There's an odd dichotomy between arguments that authorial intent is being destroyed by substituting or omitting a couple of words and various arguments that retaining them serves to create "teachable moments" about "how bad things use to be". With a few notable exceptions, "teachable moments" isn't at all what the author intended by a character using a word considered offensive in 2023 or casually assuming that women or foreigners were constitutionally unsuited to certain things, and generally they weren't trying to imply the character was a bigot (as modern audience might well misinterpret), or say anything at all about the contemporary attitudes incidentally referenced. Authorised translators use very non-literal translations, add or remove gender references or omit minor details that local audiences would completely misunderstand whilst living authors remain unconcerned and usually blissfully unaware; why are we so certain that the dead ones would deeply resent their publishers and estates making equally minor tweaks for the culture of 2020s English speakers?
Maybe the author wanted to be offensive, and we just didn't realize, IDK
But as you mentioned, the author's estate, family and editors that worked with them when they were alive are the ones that can probably make the best guess.
My problem is when publishers make changes even at times when authors are explicit in saying they don't want changes, without (not sure about this specific case, I'm just assuming here) getting approval from the estate
And due to copyright, they have the power to effectively suppress older editions. There will be no easy way to get your hands on one other than figuring out when the changes was made (which likely wasn't publicized), then tracking down a tattered old copy on ebay.
> The works are in the public domain, in which case anyone can edit up a new edition however they like, for fun or profit.
That's not as concerning, because if the original version is public domain, it will remain easily available and bowdlerized versions are unlikely to be able to compete.
This is an extremely common type of reply: Refusing to condemn something as wrong, on the basis that it's hard to write a good law that would fix it.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten [1], every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
[1] But originals are still kept in archives, and available upon request, so it's okay! Only a negligible number of people will bother so they may as well not exist, but it's okay!
> But originals are still kept in archives, and available upon request, so it's okay!
You'd wish. In reality, custodians of each archive assumed that there are still copies in the other archives, and trashed most of the works to save money, without realizing the other archives were doing the same thing to those same works.
"The copyright holders" may very well be a faceless committee instead of the original author (or estate), i.e. if some megacorp had bought the copyright and us the force behind the republishing.
I mean, that's what happens when you make copyright extend to 90 years past the death of the author. They and everyone they know dies, and the copyright still exists, and eventually it's a committee.
But it's all different committees. There's no Grand Woke High Committee dictating these changes to these works from the shadows. It's just capitalism, copyright law, and market forces.
Dr Seuss Enterprises is a private for-profit foundation established by the author's widow before her death, and while it's probably run by some sort of committee, it's a completely different committee than the board of directors at Netflix, and whatever VP heads up the Roald Dahl Story Company after its acquisition (I assume from the family, who were speaking for the company as recently as 2020).
So do we not allow the author or the author's family to set up foundations or sell their work to a corporation for half a billion dollars?
Good points. Though I think the dynamics by which DEI dos and donts propagate should probably be explained better, because apparently they do invite the image of some shadowy committee.
I suppose groupthink is a more likely explanation though.
Roald Dahl's stories are so full of inappropriate conflict resolution and outgrouping of others that it honestly feels silly to change a few words and call it fixed. I loved Dahl's stories as a kid specifically because it was obvious they were 'naughty' and like a lot of fiction they allowed me to explore darker feelings and desires without actually living them out in real life. However, that said, I don't particularly mind people updating stories to modern sensibilities as long is it is made obvious that it isn't the original edition, and those original editions are archived somewhere.
Editors have been pulling tricks forever. Taking Roald Dahl as an example, he published stories from his time as a pilot in WWII and one of them being autobiographical and about the time he crashed his plane. The editors didn't think that was exciting enough for their magazine so they changed it to imply he was shot down. Which is not what happened at all!
FYI: You can only delete comments within the first couple hours of posting (I'm not sure if it's the same as the edit window or less) and if they haven't been replied to. The other option is to reach out to the HN mods (see "Contact" at the bottom of the page).
I'm going to do a very poor attempt at explaining my feelings over this. For a long time I've idolized Teddy Roosevelt. Parts of his story just speak to me:
* He was sickly but just worked very hard to compensate and overcome it to live an outdoors-centric life. I suffer from some undiagnosable(word?) arthritis, I work hard to still do my favorite activities (backpacking, hunting and fishing).
* He was extremely well learned, thoughtful, and articulate. He kept a detailed journal. I admire those traits and try to emulate them. I pursued a PhD, I keep a journal, I frequently write to relatives and friends. I try to be thoughtful and articulate.
* He was a legendary hunter (as I mentioned I love hunting), and conservationist. He is partly responsible for the National Parks, which I enjoy every free day (I live near Yellowstone and routinely pass under his arch).
* He was empathetic and progressive for his time [0], despite his unshaking nationalism. He didn't seem to fall for toxic tropes of conservatism (although those political terms don't translate to today, Teddy is universally celebrated by the right). I believe strongly in what I consider to be core unshaking tenets of American national identity, but I also try hard to be empathetic and make sure no one is left behind. I don't believe the answer is exclusion of outgroups, which I think is a common conservative trope today. I have a lot of respect for Teddy (with some important caveats) [1].
* He held himself, and those in government to a higher standard [2]. He believed he was a public servant, and fought tirelessly against corruption. There is nothing that makes me angrier than corruption and entitlement in political office today.
I also learned, a couple years ago, he probably would have despised me, had our paths crossed. I'm mostly Italian-American, who he openly viewed as mostly criminals [3], and even went so far as to applaud a lynching of Italian Americans in New Orleans [4].
I think it's important that I learned this. I'm glad it wasn't erased or ignored or left out of the record. I learned a few things from it. I learned (well, I already knew, but it was reinforced) that no one is perfect. No one. And that perfection is the enemy of self-improvement, it is the enemy of progress, and it is the enemy of good. There's no part of me that I'm aware of that's worse for having held TR in such high esteem and tried to emulate the great things I found about him. In fact, his example has improved my life in a variety of ways, particularly my mental health and fortitude, seeing him as an example. Sure, it made me sad to learn that fact about him, but in terms of material affect? It had no change. Words, thoughts, opinions, ideas, are necessarily flawed and incomplete as a direct result of the human condition. Pretending they are not creates two things:
1) An impossible standard
2) A false sense of security and satisfaction
I'm better at some things than TR. I don't have Italian Americans (or any minority group for that matter, my understanding was that he had similar feelings about natives). That alone is a major victory. By not having to draw myself against perfect examples, I can foster some feeling of accomplishment, but I can also learn that my idols were flawed and that even if I am flawed in many ways, I can hopefully still do some good. That's an important motivator.
A perfect example is one I will never live up to, and in that case, why even try?
Great comment, thanks for taking the time to write that out. I think for a lot of people they look to books or other things to tell them what to think. Other people (like you it sounds like) look to books to share a story or a perspective or an idea and that engaging with the idea doesn't imply endorsing it.
Also, everyone wants to think that they would be the brave resistance fighter when in fact most of us don't "choose" sides in any meaningful sense and just go along with the status quo. I think seeing these really smart and progressive (for their time) people and what their blind spots were despite their brilliance can help me look inwards and see where I might be a "man of my time" and missing something later generations will judge me for
It's important to judge people in context. Just as you wouldn't think as harshly of a thief who grew up in a poor, violent household, you shouldn't think as harshly of the ignorance of a historical figure as you would of a person of today who should know better. I suspect there are many things about the people of today which the people of a century hence will regard as utterly depraved.
We're making the third choice, which is to edit the words of the people we worship in order to maintain that worship, to keep them heroic. Keeping people from idolizing racists by going back and making them not racist (so we can continue to worship the same things without guilt.)
Instead we should just be adult, and recognize that being racist isn't an entire person, it's a component of a person that may have other components that are deeply admirable. The refusal to admit that causes difficulties for people whose almost entire academic life consisted of the study of the works of racists. Deleting their racism from history is a comfortable solution for people still living off the wealth that their racist ancestors accumulated.
Fairly often, people who lived in exactly the same time judged their contemporaries too by the exact same standards you complain about. There is this knee jerk assumption out of nowhere about pretty much any bad act by major popular figure being chalked up to their naivite or just them being product of times with zero own thinking agency.
Sometimes it is the case, but also plenty of times these were conscious decisions or strongly criticized by contemporaries.
I think about the fragility of heroic personas a lot. During the peak of the 2020 protests and riots, there was a spate of statue toppling that, on their face, seemed excessive. Like various Confederate leaders, sure. But George Washington? Thomas Jefferson?
But it turns out that George Washington owned a lot of slaves. Jefferson has a very complicated and questionable history with slavery in particular. I learned a bit about Robert E. Lee's history of slave ownership, and it's directly at odds with what I was taught in school. Its worth investigating if you've time.
I eventually landed on this idea that there are specific acts that we should encourage our children to emulate, but there is no entire person that any children should aspire to emulate. Oskar Schindler, we should recall, was a member of the Nazi Party (and, I'm surprised to learn from wikipedia, was employed by the Nazi intelligence organization, and was convicted of spying on Czechoslovakia for the Nazis, prior to the German occupation).
I am troubled by the idea that we should always forgive and forget, as it were, the things that get people canceled today. Yes, people change, and a questionable tweet by an 18 year old should not dog them in perpetuity until the end of their life. But on the other hand, I feel like we should not grant blanket pardon for people who have not sought to redress their own sins, and sincerely apologized. E.g. Donald Trump's past is littered with exceptionally bad behavior, and it seems he never expresses contrition, but always asks that the public set aside that bad behavior.
In regard specifically of statues and monuments, we should not erect statues of people but of ideas. New York has a tremendously famous statue, it is not a statue of a person, it's a statue of an idea and ideas are something we can aspire to in a way we cannot and should not for people.
Courthouses often feature Lady Justice, who likewise is an idea. We might erect more statues of Hope, and of Beauty, we have built many symbolic tombs said to contain an "Unknown soldier", again symbolising an idea, not the individual even in cases where a specific unidentified corpse has been entombed.
Yes, but we must use full context. Often, this is a cover for "judge people according to the prevailing views of people who held the same harmful beliefs."
The classic example is slavery in the US, where people often speak about slaveholders like there wasn't a large abolition movement and an entire population of black people who identified slavery is evil. The context must also include the people who were oppressed by these systems and beliefs.
In school people worshipped figures like Winston Churchill.
Later I learned he thought of brown people as subhuman savages. He would not respect me if I took a Time Machine to his era.
He was a product of his time. Learn his strategical thinking and grant him for his confidence and love for country.
Beyond that I will never respect him as a man. He’s dead so I don’t really care. If someone else takes issue with my pov, they can also take solace in knowing I don’t respect them as people I won’t ever acknowledge.
> If someone else takes issue with my pov, they can also take solace in knowing I don’t respect them as people I won’t ever acknowledge.
This is a strange perspective. Do you think if I went through the heroes of your own ethnicity that I would find exclusively people with noble moral systems that would respect me and what I stand for? Should I "refuse to acknowledge" you if you admire your culture's historical figures in opposition to my dislike of them, or their dislike of me?
The logical conclusion of your comment is that you never cared about heroes of his ethnicity, do not respect them and do not care. You never paid attention to them.
I don't know what his ethnicity is, so I don't know if I know the heroes of his ethnicity or not. I know an unusual amount about world history and non-western cultures compared to the average person with my general characteristics, so I believe it unlikely that I "never paid attention" or "don't care".
I am more interested in examining the moral double-standard implied by his comment, that it is just for him to refuse to acknowledge me if I admire Churchill, but that he would find it unjust if I refused to acknowledge him because he admired <hero from his own culture with beliefs I didn't like>.
"Speaking as a Black man from America, which is a racist society, no matter how much you hear it talk about democracy, it's as racist as South Africa or as racist as Portugal, or as racist as any other racialist society on this earth. The only difference between it and South-Africa: South-Africa preaches separation and practices separation; America preaches integration and practices segregation. This is the only difference. They don't practice what they preach, whereas South-Africa preaches and practices the same thing. I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil"
- Malcolm X
With Churchill I suppose people knew how he felt about them.
>He’s dead so I don’t really care. If someone else takes issue with my pov, they can also take solace in knowing I don’t respect them as people I won’t ever acknowledge.
You seem to lack the restraint of a normal civilized person. I think there's a word for that.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for—regardless of how bad or provocative another commenter is, or you feel it is.
But is this actually a personal attack or pointing out a fact and providing an opportunity for introspection?
He declared, unsourced and uncited, that Winston Churchill thought that people with "brown skin" were "subhuman savages." He then declared that because Churchill had these supposed opinions, he was not worthy of any human decency, that he was in effect a subhuman.
Furthermore, he declared that anyone who had any issue with that assessment had a share by contagion of Churchill's unpersoning. That's not civilized or cultured. There is a word for that.
A core trait of civilization is that members are entitled to the rights of citizens, which almost categorically include equal protection under the law and in the West a recognition of a shared humanity even among those that aren't citizens.
More explicitly, this is a trait of Christian civilizations. Churchill, who did believe in a developmental hierarchy, also believed that Anglo-Saxons were superior to other peoples because they had this categorical understanding of human value.
If someone arbitrarily rejects this core aspect of civilization (i.e. lacking in it), attempts to dehumanize those who do have it in a combative and dismissive manner is by definition a savage.
If pointing out that words mean things results in warnings and threats of bans, then I don't want to be a part of your circus anyway. I hope your city and industry meet the fate it deserves.
"You seem to lack the restraint of a normal civilized person" is unquestionably a personal attack and the sort of thing we ban accounts for, so please don't do that again.
I gather from your reply that you didn't intend it that way! and that's fine - except that what matters is how the comment lands with a reasonable reader. Readers don't have access to your intent - it's in your head, not ours - so the burden is on you (i.e. all of us) to disambiguate your intent explicitly.
(Btw, please don't do religious, ideological, and/or nationalistic flamewar on HN. Your comment here has elements of all three. We want curious conversation here, and that sort of flamewar is the antithesis of it, so we have to be proactive about trying to avoid it.)
Humans need heroes, we need people to believe in, to aspire to - but we should never forget that our heroes are humans - and imperfect humans at that.
One of my biggest issues with the new puritanism, is we dont let people evolve either - once you've done one bad thing - no matter what redemption or evolution you have later in life - you're just the guy who did the bad thing.
Generally also, I think its bad to judge historical figures by current norms too.
Like on TR - TR's views on... well pretty much everything evolved over time too (he notably became more progressive and more radical in that progressivism with age).
His views on race evolved too as far as I know too (though I dont have sources handy to talk about it).
I might get down-voted for this, but I totally understand why Netflix, who bought the Dahl Company in 2021, is editing these stories.
I agree that it is important to have a full and complete historical record, but Netflix is interested in making money, and I recently read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my six year old and he loved it. So I started to read Charlie and the Glass Elevator to him and stopped only a few pages in when some very offensive caricatures of Chinese people talking in English showed up. And I haven't read my son any more Dahl since then, because I was genuinely shocked at what I had just read, stopped that book after that chapter, and went off to read something else instead, and haven't gotten around to James and the Giant Peach or Matilda again. It interrupted what could have been a lovely flow of Dahl books. So I can understand why the people who control the Dahl Company- and desperately want people like me to read his stories to people like my son- are stealth-editing them to kill the offensive stuff, so that I will buy more books, read them to my son, and then he will 30 years from now buy them and read them to his children because they have nostalgic value for him: they remind him of his dad reading to him.
This censorship isn't happening because of the iron hand of the state or anything like that. It's the result of people making choices within a capitalist system. It's because I have lots of great stories to choose from to read to my six year old, so why would I choose one that I have to explain lots of ugly bigotry? So Netflix is choosing to try and sand down those problems that might keep someone like me from reading the book to my kid, in a totally understandable way. And, as the rights owner trying to maximize revenue, that is their prerogative.
In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how foreigners look and how they speak Chinese. The Chinese don’t see such poking fun as a problem, nor do a great many other peoples on earth. Parts of Western culture, like yourself feeling such things interrupted the flow of the Dahl book, are the odd ones out here, and one might ask oneself if it has to be this way. Of course, I agree that there are powerful corporate motivations to avoid anything that might turn off potential consumers.
Moral relativism aside, there’s a taboo against “punching down” in humor and comedy. It’s obviously a fuzzy heuristic but in general, people from Western imperial powers making fun of the people they’ve exploited is pretty far in the unacceptable column.
A caricature of a French, British, or German person in American media, for example, is much more acceptable than a caricature of a Chinese person.
Even that taboo against punching down is a peculiarity of (some parts of) modern Western culture. The blind, deaf, crippled, and mentally retarded are a favourite butt of jokes all over the world.
More and more, I find that sugar coating everything and coddling everyone is not kind or compassionate.
I'm not saying that we should be going out of our way to make fun of everyone every chance we get, but this idea that "oh, those people are different so they are off limits for jokes or criticism" is a good way to make sure those people never develop any level of resilience.
There's a difference between poking fun and outright bigotry, though. I'm not saying Dahl is one thing and the Chinese media is another, but I think we need to look harder at all of these things to figure out what place it's coming from.
And even then, poking fun, to me, is a personal thing. There are poking-fun-type things I might say to a close friend that I would never say to an acquaintance. Making fun of a random-stranger foreigner who is doing you the honor of trying to learn your language is just mean-spirited, no matter how you look at it. Makes me wonder about the kind of people who would do that. As to your specific statement:
> In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how foreigners look and how they speak Chinese.
To me that just sounds like propaganda. The Chinese media is promoting the idea of Chinese superiority. "All those people from other nations look funny, and are too stupid to speak our language properly." Anecdotally, an ethnically-Chinese friend of mine who lived in China for a few years (and traveled around the country quite a bit) used to tell me that many, many native-born Chinese people speak Mandarin poorly, some to the point of being difficult to understand. So poking fun at foreigners for their bad Chinese is ironic, perhaps to the point of being a little sad.
In terms of ethnicity, isn't China something like 91% Han Chinese? I wonder if that has anything to do with the incentive structure behind why their media denigrates other races.
The irony being that if the public domain had actually been 28 years as it was originally legislated back in the 18th century in the United States, this kind of change wouldn't be controversial. People would be likely used to maintaining cultural media to keep it both relevant and free of changing taboos. And it would likely be decentralized enough that there wouldn't be any single Authorized Version except that which the original author published.
> So I started to read Charlie and the Glass Elevator to him and stopped only a few pages in when some very offensive caricatures of Chinese people talking in English showed up.
Couldn't you have just skipped over this bit? Or paraphrased it to your child? I understand that you may have been just reading along and found yourself reading out 'bad stuff' but for me, that would just be the point where I would have stopped and done either of the two options above (skip or summarise).
21st-century publishers should stop trying to endlessly flog 20th-century books that have severe dissonance with current values, then. There is a point where you just can't serve the old stuff up without a huge "hey it was sixty years ago and this author was a horrible product of Britain's racist, colonialist upper class" disclaimer in the front, or a major re-working.
I find it kind of fascinating that this article is fine with the changes made to Ursula K. LeGuin's work, but is up in arms over Dahl and Fleming and Christie getting a de-upper-class-twitification. Why is this particular shit so sacred to the Post's "editorial board"?
I don't share your values, and I don't want you or people like you to have any control over what I read it or how I read it.
There are many people who agree with me. It's "sacred" to the Post because the people writing for the Post believe these works have a place in the literary canon. People in society possess systems of morals that directly contradict each other.
I find it kind of fascinating that this article is fine with the changes made to Ursula K. LeGuin's work, but is up in arms over Dahl and Fleming and Christie
It's a case of changing the meaning of the statement vs translating the vocabulary to more accurately reflect the original meaning. Editing Lord of the Rings so Frodo tosses another bundle of sticks onto the fire doesn't alter the meaning. His example from Death on the Nile is straight-up altering the personality of a character to make her a better person.
I'd argue that any alteration to the prose is counter to authorial intent. Some people might be fine with that, but I don't want to read a book not knowing whether words were substituted for others because some editor thought that they were too antiquated or difficult for lowly readers. Footnotes exist for a reason (and dictionaries for that matter). Lately I often feel that publishers don't respect consumers' intelligence.
I'd argue that any alteration to the prose is counter to authorial intent.
I agree fully, but for me the difference is between something being groan-worthy and something being sacrilege. I don't object when someone translates a work into another language.
There's a point in which you stop reading books as if they were about you, or models that you are expected to imitate, and you think of them as statements by the people that wrote them, at the time that they wrote them, and interesting if you want to understand the times they were written in.
Spoiled children of privilege work at publishers because no one else can afford degrees from the right colleges, then move on to working for free in New York, or being handed the job by a friend of a friend. They have no concept of art that doesn't involve seeing themselves "reflected" in it, and they think "inclusion" is them allowing other types of people to see themselves in art (and they think that they should be praised for this "tolerance" and "celebration" of "identities.")
Real inclusion is having a system that includes people working in it that aren't all from the same flaky class, and with the new addition of queer identities, all of your diversity can consist of wealthy straight white people (there's barely any reason to pretend to be Native American, Hispanic, or black anymore.) Their awful scribbles on the works of their superiors (the significantly less narcissistic privileged white people of the past) age like fish, and their work will be seen by relatively normal people from the future as bowdlerized works are seen now: as birdcage liner.
This already happened for a long time with translations, I assume because it's easier to get away with mistranslation of originals. It's common to translate a phrase into the most current version of the phrase in the target language and to update the translation regularly. To me this always felt very noticeable, doing this requires an impressive level of entitlement to take a great work of literature and add your own artistry on top of it. I vaguely imagine you should get hard prison time for violating great works of literature like that, but that's just me. It's akin to defacing paintings or statues to hide genitalia which happened in the past.
> This already happened for a long time with translations, I assume because it's easier to get away with mistranslation of originals. It's common to translate a phrase into the most current version of the phrase in the target language and to update the translation regularly. To me this always felt very noticeable, doing this requires an impressive level of entitlement to take a great work of literature and add your own artistry on top of it.
Isn't that "impressive level of entitlement" a basic requirement for translation? It does take artistry to make a translation. Even if you're not going for a literary result, there are always going to be meanings that exist (or can be expressed efficiently) on one language but not the other. Then there are idioms and cultural references.
Indeed, to the point where translations are often known relative to their translator because the translator is often part of what makes a given edition of a work.
My understanding was that this is a requirement of translation, specifically because many things do not translate literally? Like wordplay, or idioms, or euphemisms.
> It's common to translate a phrase into the most current version of the phrase in the target language
That is correct way of translating and not an violation. If the original author wrote the book with contemporary style, pleasant to read to people at the time, proper translation will produce contemporary text.
There is no reason to use archaisms or outdated language in translation if the original author was not using archaisms or outdated language.
Translations are a tricky thing in general. For example this article mentions "queer" and it's very hard to translate, or "gay" to give another well-known example. I dislike changing these sort of words because they have a particular "old-fashioned feeling" to them, and if you change the word then you change that "feeling".
But I wouldn't know how to translate that to Dutch; there simple aren't archaic words that mean the same, AFAIK, so you will have to convey that feeling in another way. Or what more often happens is that it will just get lost – and that's okay as a translation will never be the same as the original in any case.
(Aside: I also think that no one is "offended" by these sort of words, as they deliberately co-opted archaic words for their movements; everyone understands that older writings will use these words in their original meaning and no one has a problem with that. If you do, then you're a rather queer person IMO.)
It is not possible to translate a work without adding yourself to it. There is no neutral or flat translation option. "Traduttore, traditore," as has been said for centuries.
You can think that a particular translation is poor, but there isn't a choice between a translation that does and does not add the artistry of the translator.
>But, in general, the best way to respond to language that some or most readers would find inappropriate is not with unexplained revisions but to surround original works with context, in the form of critical introductions as well as annotations in new editions, wherever possible.
I agree with this, however at a certain point we have to be pragmatic and avoid the perfect being the enemy of the good. These works are often never put into context. Sometimes that is because a child is reading the work themselves. Sometimes it is because the government is actively trying to make it illegal to provide that context.
Therefore I wonder if it is just easier to remove a word here and there when it is mostly irrelevant to the story. Changing "natives" to "locals" or "fat" to "enormous" doesn't change anything material about those works. If anything it makes the original more accessible because it removes a potential distraction for a modern reader.
It seems a little weird to me to be so dogmatic about the importance of preserving the exact original text as in many instances those were in flux too. The fact that the article uses Oompa Loompas as an example is especially strange considering the version the article wants to preserve is already a politically correct update of the original in which they were more clearly African slaves.
When and where does it end? It's completely arbitrary. Why is the word you find offensive OK to edit but the ones I find not? It all becomes a political thing and everything gets ruined.
We all know that controlling language is a form of power and that's the entire point of these revisions. Whoever controls the language controls the masses, it has been said. Destroy whatever was important and sacred to the culture you're colonizing and/or destroying. The first step is to change the meaning of words. And of course, it's "for the children".
>When and where does it end? It's completely arbitrary. Why is the word you find offensive OK to edit but the ones I find not? It all becomes a political thing and everything gets ruined.
I don't buy this slippery slope argument. Where does it end? It ends wherever the rights holders of the books say it ends. If you want them to change a word you think is offensive, try to convince them to change it.
>We all know that controlling language is a form of power and that's the entire point of these revisions. Whoever controls the language controls the masses, it has been said. Destroy whatever was important and sacred to the culture you're colonizing and/or destroying. The first step is to change the meaning of words. And of course, it's "for the children".
This is a rather hyperbolic claim for changing a few sentences in a story about kids visiting a chocolate factory. No one is "controlling the masses" with Roald Dahl books. This isn't about changing the history books. It is ensuring that stories can still be enjoyed in the same way they were originally without being burdened with either an accompanied history lesson or what we now view as bigotry.
> If you want them to change a word you think is offensive, try to convince them to change it.
Yeah, let's ratchet it up and take the culture war into absolutely everything. It's a bad precedent. You've already seen the right now taking up the left's tactics and it's not the kind of place anyone wants to be in.
> This isn't about changing the history books.
That's has been happening too! Revise so that everything was bad and everything we are doing is good.
> what we now view as bigotry.
"We"? who is "we"? If someone doesn't like our culture and wants their own then they should invent it. They are interlopers that should stop trying to take our culture and changing it to suit their belief system. They need to create their own idols and gods if the existing ones don't suit their arbitrary, new standard.
>Yeah, let's ratchet it up and take the culture war into absolutely everything. It's a bad precedent. You've already seen the right now taking up the left's tactics and it's not the kind of place anyone wants to be in.
What are you suggesting here? Should we curtail free speech by either restricting how a copyright holder can edit their work or that protests against those copyright holders should be limited?
>That's has been happening too! Revise so that everything was bad and everything we are doing is good.
What are you suggesting here? Should history never be reevaluated with modern context?
>"We"? who is "we"?
Society
> If someone doesn't like our culture and wants their own then they should invent it. They are interlopers that should stop trying to take our culture and changing it to suit their belief system. They need to create their own idols and gods if the existing ones don't suit their arbitrary, new standard.
I imagine this isn't your intent, but this might not even be indirect enough to be considered a dog whistle. Comments like "They are interlopers that should stop trying to take our culture" are exact phrases we might expect in a racist manifesto. Considering the topic at hand and your previous questioning of my use of pronouns, maybe be a little more cautious about your "our"s and "they"s.
"Careful, sir. I think you've had too much to think. Any more comments like that and the thought police may be alerted. We wouldn't want that, would we?"
> What are you suggesting here? Should we curtail free speech by either restricting how a copyright holder can edit their work or that protests against those copyright holders should be limited?
It's telling you use "copyright holder" and not "author". I wouldn't be against a law that forced them to slap a big "Edited without author's permission" label on such falsified books.
I also don't buy your implied argument that if we can't find a perfect legislative solution to a problem, we shouldn't complain about it in the first place.
No it’s not. It’s a fringe minority of very active and loud people. Taken to a vote the popular cause would reject the abandonment and destruction and desecration of our cultural artifacts.
> I imagine this isn't your intent, but this might not even be indirect enough to be considered a dog whistle.
My intent is that there is an active interest in destroying liberal western tradition and culture. Destroying our cultural artifacts is a front on that war. It’s not that I mind the war but rather that the instigators hide behind rhetoric like “it’s just a book” when it’s actually a malignant problem.
I will defend my culture - that is, the culture that I believe interlopers are trying to destroy by throwing the baby out with the bath water. The culture that through its generosity, politeness, and respect has been taken advantage of and had these values used against it.
>It’s American culture which includes everyone that wants to participate. I don’t know why you associate that with white supremacy.
I'm not associating American culture with white supremacy. You are using the exact same rhetoric that white supremacists use. I don't know if you are just trolling me, if you are a legitimate white supremacist, or if you are just completely ignorant of your rhetoric.
In case it is the latter, I will be clear and direct and tell you that white supremacists use the same terms and phrases you use about "interlopers" waging "war" against and "destroying liberal western tradition and culture". If you aren't one, you really should be more mindful about how you speak on this subject. There are ways to convey your views without coming off like a bigot trying to watch their words which is exactly what you sound like in these last few comments.
I’m not too up to date on what white supremest’s say. There aren’t very many of them and the ones that do exist I’m not too interested in.
What I’m saying is defacing history is bad. Defiling it is bad. It is an affront to our culture and our artifacts and it matters. Create NEW culture with original ideas but don’t vandalize what exists and is important to people. Don’t attempt to change history. Make new history with original ideas. Appropriating existing cultural artifacts isn’t the way.
> However at a certain point we have to be pragmatic and avoid the perfect being the enemy of the good. These works are often never put into context.
Then just don't make changes, and trust that your readers are capable of withstanding raw, unfiltered, uncensored exposure to words from a different time and place. You don't need to "protect" people from wrong opinions, and they don't want to be protected
It is historical revisionism, and making superficial changes to it is overall harmful.
If a work is written by a racist author, changing a few words isn't magically going to make the author not racist. Their opinions will have influenced the entire story. The article clearly demonstrates this with the Death on the Nile example: the entire work is based on the framework of British colonialism, removing a few racist stereotypes isn't going to change anything about that! At best, you end up pretending that racism never existed - which isn't exactly a great thing to teach children either.
Works like that should be provided as-is, with the required context as to why the work is the way it is. If we want to provide children with works that are more up-to-date with today's society, then start providing newer works. It's not as if nobody has written a book in the last few decades!
A historical work like Mein Kampf you would read annotated with scientific insights and commentary (which is exactly what was done in Germany with that book a few years ago), or just straight up as-is if your German is up to it and you have the ability to place it in its proper context.
I haven't seen anyone that doesn't like the edits give the real reason that they are so upset about the edits. If the edits were politically slanted in a different direction, the edit-opposers would only oppose edits on principle. "Why, of course I don't support changing words in old works to make the work conform to modern standards, don't be ridiculous." But the edit-opposers are angry because the edits are clearly the work of modern western hyper-progressives, who are simultaneously trying to retain the conquests and achievements of the Old World while erasing any moral belief left over from the Old World.
I do not wish to see society remade by the vision of the modern western progressive, and so I don't want progressive edits to books I loved as a child.
Edit: Editing books allows progressives to simultaneously avoid the label of "book banning", which they at least claim to detest, while also constructing an incorrect image of the people of the past to aid in the moral instruction of modern children. It is the same story, over and over again, whether it's communists or religious people: "you cannot have access to information that contradicts the moral worldview we wish you to have. This is for your own safety and for the good of your fellow man."
I find this whole argument quite bizarre - we've been 'updating' books for centuries to match the current (at time of update) language, norms, fashions.
The original Shakespeare is still available, but most people read/watch adaptations or revisions (partly because Shakespeare's English has long gone).
So, as long as the originals haven't been burnt by the good people of Florida, who cares about the updates?
A translation is a translation, a book is a book. Would you agree to retouch some paintings in the Louvre for the greater good? Or, less radically, take the originals down and put retouched versions up?
I personally wouldn’t touch an updated classic with a 10 foot pole - but there’s a market for sanitized classics. If the publishers think it will help them sell more books, it’s hard to fault them for it.
But you do know that the original one is the one in Louvre and saw a least a detailed photo of it, maybe even the real thing. Racist, misogynist or whatever, the art in its original form is still there.
When the books are censored the opposite happens. The original in the people's mind changes and the original nuances of the art is lost. Moreover we lose our understanding of progress. The change of the worldview and the values is an important part of understanding art.
If we would like to show the progress we made and our current values, we should create our own classics for generations to read and understand us, rather than muddying the water between us and the previous generations.
> Please show me where laws are being made preventing you from owning/accessing a copy of the original.
This one is just called "intellectual property rights". If you don't already have a copy of the original, you won't be able to get one if the rightsholder chooses to withdraw it from sale.
The point has been clear all along. No books are being censored.
Nobody is preventing anyone from accessing the original version.
The publisher is not, and should not, be forced by anyone to produce any version at all.
If you had been an author you would understand that selling your rights to a publisher is no guarantee that the book will even be printed, there have been numerous examples over the decades of rights being acquired for a work and then never exercised such that that work is never published (this is especially common with movie rights),
Complaining that you as an author want to retain a right on editorial actions is fine if you dont sell that right. But if you were an author you would know that that doesn't always happen.
Complaining as a consumer makes very little sense. It's fine to air your grievance, but the truth is you have no right on what is produced at all.
That’s precisely the point. Just because those things (which you associate with ”censorship”) are not being done, you are comfortable. But what is happening is happening and it’s just a matter of whether you agree or not, it’s how you build your own understanding and perspective of the world. Not everything needs to be all-in.
Do you agree with art being instrumentalized and turned into something that can be ”retouched for the greater good” by the hands of people who couldn’t possibly publish a single successful blog post? Would you let HN mods retouch your comment if they found something offensive in it (for whatever spurious criteria happened to be trendy at any given time)? Those are all questions you should ask yourself.
I live in a country where the children’s lullabies have been butchered and changed into bland, uninteresting versions of the originals, which were amazing records of cultural heritage. That heritage has been denied to my children (I try to sing the original ones but the school uses the new versions and so they don’t want to hear mine). They also use gender neutral pronouns and forbid us to take pictures in events but that’s a topic for another time.
Are you selling that by passing it as the original, or by telling people that these are minor changes for the greater good, and that it’s mostly the same as the original?
The copyright holders of Shakespeare don't put the First Folio edition of Romeo and Juliet out of print when Baz Luhrmann releases Romeo + Juliet.
When works go out of print they become rare and hard to find. There are only 200 or so original prints of the First Folio in existence; Shakespeare is kept alive by subsequent reprintings. When publishers "update" old works for modern sensibilities, it's with an eye toward replacing the old version with the new; they simply refuse to publish the old version. If it's a print book it'll still be there, but become slowly harder and harder to obtain until it's nearly impossible, and most people don't even remember it anyway[0]. If it's an e-book, it's as good as gone; anyone who still has it has committed a felony to preserve it. Long copyright terms help enormously with this.
Some books don't even get replaced. The word "nerd" is thought to have originated from the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo; Seuss's publisher has decided the book is too racist to continue to be in print, so it too has gone on to book afterlife.
[0] The black pygmy Oompa-Loompas were almost a "Mandela effect" thing for me; my school library had a 1960s edition of the book. Only when I read about the changes later in life was I like "Oh, so that's why the Oompa-Loompas are different."
The copyright OWNERS are to be denied their rights to do with their property what they wish?
Further, they're forced to print some version of their property?
Honestly, no, books go in and out of print all day long, and first editions have always been 'collectible' because they're 'original'
Changes/edits happen all the time (hell some authors keep web pages of errata because their originals require updating), just that the edits in question have people clutching their pearls.
Whilst I agree that copyright is absurdly long - changing that isn't going to prevent people from creating updates that suit their whims (look at the Winnie the Pooh (original) cartoons people are able to create because that fell out of copyright recently.
It's made zero difference to the original (which has been out of print for decades)
> The copyright OWNERS are to be denied their rights to do with their property what they wish?
Yes. The purpose of copyright is to protect and promote cultural works, that's why governments instituted it. If the institution is no longer serving its purpose, it should be reformed
I don't mean to contribute to Alyssa Rosenzweig's observed toxic techbrosplaining and 'um, actually'ing here on Hackernews but, um, actually...
In the UK the purpose of copyright was originally to give the King's approved publishers a monopoly on published material. The copyright was literally a right to copy, to operate a printing press.
Even today, in France copyright is seen as a droit d'auteur, a moral right to a work you have simply by being the author of the work. Forget promoting cultural works for the public's benefit. As the author you are entitled even to determine who may even see the work, and how they may see it. You can go full Prince and lock your magnum opus in a vault, that is a right that is legally and morally respected.
It's only in the USA where the justification of copyright is to "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts", and so we feel entitled to other people's work.
I understand, even agree with, the "droit d'auteur" view, when there is a single primary author (or small group) that is still alive and holds the rights. But not for megacorp publishing houses, or the spoiled grandchildren of a long-dead author.
I'm not saying the copyright owners are to be denied anything, only that it's a crying shame they're doing what they're doing. They are within their rights to do so, and given that just about all public companies have ESG rules they need to adhere to, there may not have been a realistic alternative.
It's a crying shame that George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney, who proceeded to dismantle the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. It's a crying shame that after the failure of the Amico, the current rightsholders to Intellivision are selling off their game IPs piecemeal, preventing another collection like Intellivision Lives from happening. But everyone involved in these actions is acting within their rights to the IP in question.
The original plan was to publish only the revised editions, and not the originals. This ALSO meant that e-book copies would be automatically updated. I don't think "we'll make the original writings unavailable to anyone" is a good thing. They walked back on that after the controversy though, and you can now buy both the original and revised editions.
It would be like someone deciding that only the NIV of the bible can be bought from now on, and the KJV wouldn't be sold any more and all e-book versions of the KJV would be updated. For modern readers the NIV is clearly the better translation IMO, but there's obviously also a lot of value in having the KJV around (as well as other editions).
I also have some gripes with some specific edits they made – at times it feels like they weren't even trying to replace the original with something decent and some edits are ridiculous – but that's more minor. The biggest problem was the "here are the new versions and these are the versions everyone should have and the original versions never existed" kind of attitude they seemed to have.
Meh, language changes. 21st-century books will be edited by 22nd century people, that's for sure. And verbatim copies will be free to reprint as they fall out of copyright.
Politically motivated changes might sometimes be ridiculous, but there's also the real need to update forgotten words, or words that have drastically changed their meaning.
At least it's not done with the same level of fanaticism as Iceland's war against foreign loanwords, for example.
The example with "fat" Augustus Gloop becoming "enormous" - that's actually a good thing, regardless of the politics involved! The causes of obesity were poorly understood back then, partially due to the sugar industry's lobbying. There's no need to propagate this misunderstanding to the next generation in a book for young people.
Edit: Wow - this is a downvote magnet! Go and try reading Beowulf in the original Old English, or something.
> The causes of obesity were poorly understood back then, partially due to the sugar industry's lobbying.
I am fat, and the sugar industry has nothing to do with it. I don't like sugar, or sweet food in general; I eat healthy, old-fashioned home-cooked meals prepared from zero-sugar raw ingredients - they just happen to be consistently bigger meals than a stressed out software engineer with a low physical activity level ought to be eating. So the weight increases.
There is a sane medium to be found somewhere between the "fat person = greedy and evil person" trope of 20th century fiction, and today's "fat person = innocent, agency-less victim of the Big Sugar conspiracy" trope.
If a book had an idiot villain character who was portrayed as a villain for something that is very central to my identity, I think maybe that could make me offended. I haven't seen one yet.
Not even that egregious. I often see remasters on top of remasters in 4k HDR for very old films. If these are really a better experience does that mean the original audience had a lesser experience?
The original audiences saw them projected on film and the resolution was fantastic. I believe the contrast was not as good as an OLED TV or Dolby Cinema though.
If you are the owner of a 20th century IP there is no reason you should not want to rework it for a new market if your motive is profit. It's not wokeism to make Rohl Dahl readable to zoomers, it's capitalism.
Roald Dahl himself didn’t agree with you. He didn’t try to pass off a censored Cinderella as the original version. He wrote his own and published it under his own name.
And you know what? His Cinderella was fucking terrible and I’ve been waiting decades to have a platform to point that out. His original IPs are way better than his retellings. Glad to get that off my chest.
This comment gave me a solid chuckle. I have things like this as well, but I've been low-key stewing on for years or decades, just waiting for the right moment to let the world know.
As an author, a lot of this bugs me but not for the reasons listed in the article. Trying to patch over old stories just ends up making them worse most of the time.
I'd rather see people retell the story without the stuff they see as problems. Get at the heart of the story and tell it better. (IIRC, this is what happened in Shakespeare's time.)
But no one is going to do that. It's more work and everyone is looking to do this as cheaply as possible to make more money.
Editing is supposed to be a collaborative process - and these people are dead - there is no author to collaborate with - it just makes a worse product in the end (in ever example cited in the article) - a good editor can make a good work great, a bad one can make a great work bad.
There are some of us who say that it definitely does, and that it was reprehensible of Paramount executives to sit through a pitch, reject it, and then direct their writers to create exactly the same concept for their own existing franchise. It cost the Babylon 5 makers considerable money and reputation. It was abuse of privileged information.
Children don't need "historical honesty". They need simple tales that help them understand the world around them and spark their imagination. No one is saying to burn all 20th century prints of Dahl books, but I don't really understand why the stories can't be tweaked a little to more aligned with the world we live in now.
I can't find much reason to alter Agatha Christie or Ian Fleming though, since those books are intended for adults.
It's a line that shouldn't be crossed imho. Even if a work of art features offensive language or ideas, the art should still exist in its original form like the creators intended. To change art based on modern standards has been done before, when the clergy covered up nude paintings by "fig leafing" them, it was later seen for what it was. subsequent conservative social norms interfering with the purpose of the original art.
>Even if a work of art features offensive language or ideas, the art should still exist in its original form like the creators intended.
Often these edits are about preserving the creator's intent. If an author used a word that was inoffensive a hundred years ago and is now offensive, it is more in line with the author's intent to change the word to the modern inoffensive equivalent than to preserve the offensive one that now conveys something different from what it meant to the author.
This assumes it’s possible to fully understand an author’s intent. Story and plot is part of it, sure, perhaps the most easily interpretable part. But there are myriad other concerns, the rhythm and musicality of the language, alliteration, presenting something as known or unknown to the POV characters, and cultural specificity.
I would not want my work rewritten in any manner after my death, if still associated with my name. Folks are free to write their own materials that properly reflect their vocabulary values. And if they’re any good, the free market will surely do its work.
>This assumes it’s possible to fully understand an author’s intent. Story and plot is part of it, sure, perhaps the most easily interpretable part. But there are myriad other concerns, the rhythm and musicality of the language, alliteration, presenting something as known or unknown to the POV characters, and cultural specificity.
Sure, and maybe the author had deeply held beliefs about typefaces and would be appalled that a user can now choose their own typeface on a Kindle. At a certain point, it is a little silly to try to fully understand and preserve every intent of the author. But a character going from good person to a racist due to nothing but the aging of their language is a pretty dramatic alteration of an author's intent that is easy to identify and rectify.
>And if they’re any good, the free market will surely do its work.
Do realize this is exactly what's happening here? These new versions are happening because of capitalistic reasons in that it is harder to sell a book that has a bunch of accidental bigotry in it.
> But a character going from good person to a racist due to nothing but the aging of their language is a pretty dramatic alteration of an author's intent that is easy to identify and rectify.
The character is not going from a good person to a racist a due to their language. The character (in my scenario) remains entirely unchanged. What has changed is your (and most modern reader’s) perception of the character.
Which is part of the point. Characters exist in the world they inhabit, not yours or mine or anyone else’s. A huge part of the artistic experience is reinterpreting and reframing the meaning of a work as society develops.
Emotional and moral complexity is a goal in literature, not a bug.
> Do realize this is exactly what's happening here? These new versions are happening because of capitalistic reasons in that it is harder to sell a book that has a bunch of accidental bigotry in it.
Again I must gently disagree. First off, it’s not “accidental bigotry”. It’s bigotry reflective of the time in which it was written. Today in America we find it very difficult to view someone who uses the N word as an unequivocally “good” person. Was that the case in 1830?
Re: publishers releasing revised copies — they’re a business, and business often undercuts artistic intention for a profit. So it goes. If you want to say “I have no problem with rights holders revising (someone else’s) work to which they hold a copyright, to remove challenging remnants of the past and better reflect the vocabulary of today, so they sell better” — I agree 100% that’s well within their rights (however much I dislike that state of affairs).
But please don’t attribute their edits to “preserving authorial intent”. That’s putting (even more) words in the mouths of the dead.
>Characters exist in the world they inhabit, not yours or mine or anyone else’s.
Is this always the intent of the author? Sometimes authors want their characters to live in a world that is identical to ours.
>A huge part of the artistic experience is reinterpreting and reframing the meaning of a work as society develops.
Is this always the intent of the author? Reinterpreting work based on things that occurred since its creation seems to produce and inherent disconnect with what the author intended in the moment.
>Emotional and moral complexity is a goal in literature, not a bug.
Is this always the intent of the author? Not every story needs to be about every complex topic. We don't need to deal with slavery and child abuse for example in a story about a chocolate factory. The book already has its own complex topics that it directly intended to address.
>Again I must gently disagree. First off, it’s not “accidental bigotry”. It’s bigotry reflective of the time in which it was written.
Is this always the intent of the author? Not every author wants their work to be reflective of a specific moment in time. Some stories are meant to be timeless.
>But please don’t attribute their edits to “preserving authorial intent”. That’s putting (even more) words in the mouths of the dead.
You are also putting words in the mouth of the dead by assuming the answer to those above questions. I don't know why one side of this debate gets to claim they speak for the dead with perfect accuracy.
> You are also putting words in the mouth of the dead by assuming the answer to those above questions. I don't know why one side of this debate gets to claim they speak for the dead with perfect accuracy.
There is only one of us who is suggesting that changing the words in an author’s work after their death is a Good Idea. I am suggesting that the words be left alone entirely, given the objective impossibility of knowing a dead author’s original intent (so ably demonstrated by your excellent use of repetition!).
You desire (or at least accept) altering the original material without regard to the original author’s wishes. That is your right. But such an argument would seem to require justification for the change. Leaving something as is generally does not.
This difference in our positions explains why you perceive me as “speaking for the dead with perfect accuracy” while saying you do not. I am not speaking for the dead. I am letting them speak for themselves and pushing back against those who would alter their message.
You are operating under the assumption that they’d rather their work continue to generate profit for modern businesses, and would accept editing accordingly. Maybe. Maybe not. But boy is it frustrating to hear endless arguments supporting altering existing work to line other people’s pockets, with any suggestion of “write something new, yourself, if it bothers you” being blown off with “this is what they would want”.
Especially grating: the fact that this argument almost always comes out of those who have not generated any such material themselves. Perhaps if they did, they would begin to understand how carefully each word is chosen in any work possessing enough quality to last through the ages.
You cold play this game all day. Maybe the intent of the author is that 32 years after they die someone substitutes the letter p for every instance of the letter b in their novels. The thing the author wrote was clearly their intent at the time. Anything else is speculation.
We don't use that kind of reasoning in other fields though.
I.e. preserving historical architecture is not about restoring the building to how we believe it was supposed to be shown - otherwise, the Egyptian pyramids would have gotten back their white finish and gold tip long ago.
Instead, we recognise that those buildings are from a different time and try to highlight the feats of that time that make them remarkable still today.
> the Egyptian pyramids would have gotten back their white finish and gold tip long ago.
GP isn't even advocating that. They're advocating redoing the finish with marble, or with frameless glass windows, because that would be the modern equivalent to what those buildings were to people in ancient Egypt.
IMO, we should trust that audiences are capable of understanding the context of the time. If anything must be done, it is teaching the concept of the euphemism treadmill, and that events, conflicts, or works of literature can change the connotation of words. It's also important to understand that innocent words today could become taboo tomorrow, and not through any insensitivity or unawareness on the author's part.
What about 20 years from now, when the current offensive word becomes just tacky, and then 20 years later, an euphemism? Many words end up stuck on such multi-generational loop.
Often the revisions soften the weirdness or offensiveness of outdated mores, beliefs and customs, but by blurring them out, you miss a teaching opportunity: explaining how things were, how things are now, and why they changed.
It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain, prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do. Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand the world. And I think that's doing them a solid.
Kids eventually need to understand those things, and maybe once they're old enough it could make sense to buy a 20th century edition and try to spot the differences and figure out why they were changed. But before that can happen, kids need to understand the basics first. If I'm teaching someone how to play chess, I'm not going to introduce an en passant until they've established they understand the more common ways in which a pawn moves.
Is there any indication that children who were read those stories from hundreds of years ago ended up kind, caring, mentally resilient, etc...with whatever traits parents want to instill in their children today?
> and maybe once they're old enough it could make sense to buy a 20th century edition ...
Always supposing you _can_ still buy a 20th century version. Maybe I wouldn't feel so ambivalent about this editorialising if the editors committed to keeping both versions current
Roald Dahl books have sold over 300 million copies worldwide. The stories have been digitized, archived, transcribed, and photocopied an uncountable number of times.
I think we will have no problem finding the 20th century versions.
But we will, and rather soon, because everyone who still has a physical or digital copy will be thinking the same thing you said - "oh, it's been printed in so many copies that there won't be a problem for you to find one" - as they shred their hard drive or throw the paper book into the fireplace.
Just ask a random librarian or archivist how easy it is to find copies of local newspapers from 20+ years ago. Hint: often it's not possible, as the last library trashed its microfiche, in a mistaken belief that someone else surely digitized it already.
I understand what you're saying, but that simply will not happen with something as widespread as Roald Dahl. Newspapers have always been ephemeral - books have not been. What would happen in Dahl's case is the price on the used book market would start trending upwards for the 20th century version, and at some point someone would decide to do another version to cash in and satisfy the demand.
Sure, but then you don't want to rate a broad trend/policy by how it impacts the most high-profile cases, which by definition are mostly immune from negative consequences due to their notoriety. Move past the likes of Roald Dahl, towards less known authors, less widely spread works, and soon enough you may find works that are still culturally important, but not enough to secure their long-term survival.
> Newspapers have always been ephemeral - books have not been.
To a degree, yes. But then it's also been long recognized that local newspapers are a critical, extremely valuable window into the past. That alone justifies keeping archived copies - and I'm not talking about filling every libraries full of archival copies of major newspapers, but rather couple institutions keeping microfilms or digitized versions. As it turns out, those institutions end up assuming that the burden of preservation belongs to someone else, and this diffused responsibility leads to those "archived works" being lost forever.
> What would happen in Dahl's case is the price on the used book market would start trending upwards for the 20th century version, and at some point someone would decide to do another version to cash in and satisfy the demand.
Maybe, but I'm not sure if this holds in general, even for works of high notoriety. There may be some interest for the old edition, but if the new edition is good enough, there might be too few a people interested in the old one to make a reprint profitable.
Or at least this is how it was before. These days, the cost of storing and delivering digital copies is near-zero, print-on-demand works even for niche works and very small audiences - but there's also so much content that the work could disappear simply because nobody cared about that work in particular enough to bother keeping a copy. Bytes may be cheap, but human attention is not.
I read old Sjors & Sjimmie comics from my dad when I was a kid in the 90s. It's a classic "two boys have adventures" type of comic. Here's how the old comics looked: https://images.poms.omroep.nl/image/s750/784486.jpg
Sjimmie (the black kid) also spoke in broken Dutch, and was generally the stupid one.
Even as a 10 year old I recognized it was pretty racist, because I grew up in an environment where this sort of thing is frowned upon.
In the end you can only know about racism if you actually know what it looks like, up close, and without filter. When is too young "too young" for this? I don't know, but I think you're giving children too little credit; they're not entirely stupid. People in the past didn't become racist because of a few books or comics, they became racist due to the general culture at the time, and stuff like this is more a consequence of that than a cause.
(The comic was revamped in the 70s to not be racist by the way, and these new comics were very popular in the 80s and 90s, but the originals were never revised or updated: they just made new, better, non-racist ones.)
The most important lesson when giving kids fiction books is to teach them that these are fiction and not a historically accurate anything. That they can not take historical lessons from fictional words and assume real world worked the same way as the depicted in kids books. It is literally wrong to teach kids anything else.
It is absolutely fine to tell the kids truth about history, including the fact that these or that popular people were widely cruel, racist or sexist or defrauded or whatever. But that is something completely different then giving the kid fictional story with schematic characters and claim that kid should learn facts about historical society from it.
> It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain, prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do. Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand the world. And I think that's doing them a solid.
Fun fact: censorship in the past was actually the thing. For example, German censorship during WWI made it unprintable to reference death in kids literature.
Second, quite a lot of what was collected as fairly tales was not intended for toddlers and little four years old children the way we use them. Not just because of violence, they are just not structured for small kids, they are overly long and boring to them. They were for older children, stories then older people/youth told each other for fun. And in the past, what kids were actually pushed into were fairly often educational texts with clear moral learnings.
They did not had movies in the past. There was no Marvel, no Game of Thrones. And quite a lot of these stories are contemporary equivalent of Game of Thrones - except shorter.
Write a different book. There's no reason to believe the stories as they already existed aren't "aligned" with our world, just your own sensibilities. This is trivially reflected by the changes suggested.
You're projecting, and presenting a false choice. As a child I never needed or wanted such simple tales. Nor did they help me understand the world: rather the opposite.
Boy, speak about projection. Believe it or not, but there was a time when you didn't know everything about the world, and even simple concepts needed to be explicitly taught to you.
I'm fine with such edits as long as the buyers know what they're getting. Otherwise I'm going to end up in a situation where I'm defending some author whose book wasn't racist at all, not knowing that I read an edited version of the racist original.
The problem is that they are almost guaranteed to just be marketed as the "original", and the real original won't be available for sale anymore. Explicitly marketing a book as the "censored edition" wouldn't really go over well, would it?
The author claims that literature is not a consumer good, but that's wrong for most of 20th century books. This is exactly why author estates are doing this, to maintain the profitability of their products.
Minor gripe: there was no one "author." I found it interesting that this was "authored" by WP's Editorial Board. I sense that they wanted to avoid someone specific being dragged to shreds on Twitter (a lot harder to drag an entire editorial board of a publication than an individual). It is a smart move.
And I agree with your point, and that it extends well beyond the 20th century back to the day of patrons and benefactors who would support a creative endeavor.
Copyright is supposed to protect and promote cultural works. When a copyright holder stops doing that, and instead actively makes a work harder to find in its original form, their rights to that work should be revoked.
Let's consider a cultural work. If I make a poem, it's covered under copyright. Suppose the local library posts it on the wall for a season, for anyone to come by and read.
Libraries like to promote local culture, so they rotate things out so others get a chance to show their work. At the end of the season, my work comes down.
I take it home and file it for later. Perhaps I'm looking for a publisher but it takes a few years to find one.
It's now much harder to find in its original form.
That withdrawal from the public sphere does not revoke my copyright, nor should it revoke my copyright.
The part of me which holds a very dismal view of human nature is chuckling at this slow-motion Year Zero. Pull these books, edit others. Take these statues down; we start with some Confederates but we should be able to get Jefferson. While we are at it, why not go after the faces on Mount Rushmore.
Sure why not. Why does it matter? There’s unhoused and hungry people in the US and where its military bases are.
Instead of worrying about the country being founded by bourgeoisie supremacists whose writing the country still uses as its foundation…let’s worry if Mount Rushmore or Jefferson get “cancelled”. If they aren’t cancelled, what of all the dead victims of the exclusionary foundation of the country?
It is absolutely insane that we are allowing the destruction of culture in this manner. Can people not leave works for what they were? What has happened to today's society that everything has to be sunshine and rainbows, they can't enjoy anything without being enraged by something they don't agree. Should we only consume media that we agree with? What a boring life that is.
But if we change a few words we can have you say something else entirely. By the 4th modification you could be advocating for the destruction of physical objects.
Meanwhile people discussing the topic question if the book is improved. This has nothing to do with the topic. Assuming we've change your words, have you say something else, should there be a discussion pondering if we've improved you?
Our society has been doing this for a long time. My beloved Hardy Boy childhood books were actually the edited version - edited to remove racial stereotypes, says Wikipedia, and to target a different audience.
The 1981 revised edition of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was edited (posthumously) to remove sexist stereotypes, like replace "insurance man" with "insurance agent", and drop the section on dealing with one's wife.
> Should we only consume media that we agree with?
There are many reasons to edit a book. The Hardy Boy books were edited to generate profit from an existing franchise.
The editors of the 1981 edition of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" argue that keeping the 'quaint and dated' references weaken 'the important message and overall impact' of the book. https://archive.org/details/howtowinfriendsi0000carn/page/14... .
Neither particularly fit your description of "everything has to be sunshine and rainbows".
The problem of the idea "updated for a modern audience" is that the updates do not cater to the actual audience, instead a minority of motivated activists that seem to thrive in finding offense and extrapolating it.
It's dysfunctional toxic behavior packaged as doing good.
I wonder if its cultural revisionism along the lines of some of those pulled down statues. They don't want people to know how bad it was, so they can't compare it to how good it is now, so they think no progress has been made, thus making more activists.
Recently, some university in the US came with yet another "inclusive language" update that was widely ridiculed for it tried to replace neutral and even positive words and expressions. Language vandalism.
I've seen a theory as to where this is coming from. The particular university, as do many universities, have an inflated administration where some even have more staff than students. A significant part of that staff is DEI and pretty much everybody is to commit to this agenda.
So, you have a huge amount of people that continuously need to show evidence that they're committed to the cause. What would be the easiest thing to do?
You type in a bunch of bullshit in Word, because that's far easier than working in a soup kitchen. Actually improving the world is hard so instead you do this easy thing that provides the optics, and nothing more. You don't even need to believe it, it's largely driven by fear.
Several of the pulled-down statues were excellent candidates for being pulled down. Of all the examples of cultural revisionism to get upset over, that's not a very good one.
Many changes which I'd expect are commonly understood to be positive for society started with a small group of activists. Movements start small and public opinion doesn't change overnight. Sometimes public opinion needs a nudge from a small noteworthy action.
Had you ever discussed applying democratic values to the evaluation of the suitability of historical public statues spontaneously, before these actions made the news?
The one with Abe breaking the chains of a slave and rising from his knees is the one I was thinking of when I wrote this. I'm not sure what its called I don't live in the USA
I might allow different treatment of stuff for kids and stuff for adults, but I think I prefer to let the unadorned facts (or writings) speak for themselves. Some personal examples:
- In The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor Lavalle turns H. P. Lovecraft's most racist story ("The Horror at Red Hook") on its head, retelling it with a black protagonist. The most memorable thing about the book was that Lavalle dedicates his book "To H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings".
I wasn't aware when I first read Lovecraft in high school of how deeply racist he was. Anyone who isn't aware, as I wasn't, should read the article by Nnedi Okorafor, who won the World Fantasy Award a few years ago: http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2011/12/lovecrafts-racism-world-fa...
The Lovecraft poem quoted there is absolutely appalling. In her article, Okorafor says: "Do I want 'The Howard' (the nickname for the World Fantasy Award statuette. Lovecraft’s full name is 'Howard Phillips Lovecraft') replaced with the head of some other great writer? Maybe. Maybe it’s about that time. Maybe not. What I know I want is to face the history of this leg of literature rather than put it aside or bury it. If this is how some of the great minds of speculative fiction felt, then let’s deal with that... as opposed to never mention it or explain it away. If Lovecraft’s likeness and name are to be used in connection to the World Fantasy Award, I think there should be some discourse about what it means to honor a talented racist."
- I've been reading westerns the last few years, and (especially in the older works) see a lot of ethnic stereotyping and racism. I'm currently reading The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie. The writing is brilliant - in the westerns I've read, the only writing as good has been Willa Cather's. Guthrie is a master of free indirect speech, and most of the narration is in that form. So the characters - mountain men of the 1830s - largely tell the story. But I don't have another book (out of over a thousand) where the "n-word" occurs as frequently - an average of maybe once every 3 - 4 pages. However ... there are essentially no black characters. It is almost always used by white characters to refer to other white characters, to Indians, or to themselves (the way we'd say "this guy" or "that guy").
A more general point is how you deal with someone who did good stuff but also held, say, racist views. Within reason, I think you should credit the good things but be honest about the bad. People will differ about what falls "within reason".
- I've enjoyed Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays since high school, and still enjoy reading them. He was progressive for his time, and staunchly anti-slavery. But I was disappointed when I saw some of his journal entries in which he denigrates black people, Irish, Indians, and Chinese.
- I took a course in existentialism and phenomenology in college. When we started the section on Heidegger, the professor (Izchak Miller, who later became part of the NetHack dev team) began by putting on the screen Heidegger's infamous statement made as rector at Freiburg. Miller said that, as a Jew, he was disgusted by Heidegger's Nazi sympathies, and that someone that smart should have known better. Nevertheless, he said that Heidegger was simply too important to be ignored, and that we would examine his philosophy - and that he left it up to us to think about how we would regard his moral failings.
It's part of the current trend of hyper-moralization. "Moral exactitude is now so important that we examine all art with a fine-toothed comb for any possible transgression." I don't mean that book revisions are unthinkable evils, they happen all the time. Plenty of famous works were revised both by the author and posthumously, often to appeal to a wider audience. After all, authors like money too. And in the digital age I'm not too worried we'll lose access to the Nth edition of anything far reaching (books I mean, I do think other media can disappear).
What's interesting is the trend itself, after decades of liberation why are we on eggshells? Is this emergent or a purposeful effort? What is this doing to current art? How much longer will this persist?
I suspect it's related to the extreme "partyism" we see today. Moral issues are now political issues. And while our personal lives have been liberated, our politics are both judged harshly and used as our identity. I think new art is suffering, that interesting things don't thrive in a partisan environment: this is the popularity-fueled echo chamber you're probably aware of. I don't want to believe this will last long, I want to say that people are losing interest in their dogma and want to hear new music again. But I'm not confident in that at all, I feel the trend has yet to peak.
246 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadIIRC, that was done by the original author himself. That's far different than an anonymous committee quietly revising past works to conform to the current political line. I mean that's such a blatant parallel to a famous work of dystopian fiction that they should know better not to do it.
Though, I honestly look forward to a revised version of that famous work, revised to conform to modern sensitivities. IIRC, there's some out-of-fashion racial descriptions and the whole disapproving take on doctoring older works has to go.
As far as I can tell, a major component of woke bowdlerization of the past seems to be finding depictions of black people and either eliminating them or making them conform to the idealistic stereotypes of modern white liberals. That's stacking stereotypes on stereotypes, and the truth of the black experience gets buried even deeper.
The way my grandmother spoke would be cut out of a modern novel as a racist stereotype.
Modern reimagining of The Three Musketeers make Musketeers sound more honorable and noble then actual text. Some comedies make them sound incapable, clumsy and funny. Dumas politics was not pro-ancient regime and he actually makes it clear. Making that into super honorable flawless dudes is as much "changing past fiction" as if you slapped gender or race or made them eskimos. But somehow that is fine.
> If all we see is fictional pasts where black people are just white people with tans, and women are just pretty men, what are black people and women complaining about?
In general, they complain about how they are or were treated back in real world. They also complain about being depicted in fiction as dumb simpletons without agency and then people on discussion forums claiming that those dumb simpletons depictions somehow constitute historical reality.
Back in the early 2000s I saw someone refer to a wheelchair-bound person as "handicapable". The disabled fellow ran over his foot lol.
Point being I think it's best not to minimize people's suffering. Acknowledge it, respect it, and try to move forward together.
I don't want others to think of me as disabled either (though a little understanding might be nice when I fail to mask well enough).
Maybe the problem is how we treat the disabled, not the words we use to talk about disability?
In general, it's (IMHO) not needed to have centuries old books full of stereotypes in modern curricula. There are so many works that have been published in the last decades that provide far better diversity of all kinds than even a "de-racisted" historic book can. Modern authors, modern artists, modern composers and other artists deserve their shine in the spotlight as well - it's ridiculous how much of curricula is spent on stuff that happened or got created hundreds to thousands of years ago. We have to refocus education on modern events if we want a modern society.
And if you want something filled with racial or other stereotypes in curricula, ffs print it with commentary like we do with Hitler's "Mein Kampf" here in Germany. That is, coincidentally, the only way one is allowed to do a reprint in Germany due to copyright and anti-Nazi symbolism laws.
How can a word be a bomb?
And I'm still at a loss how in a supposedly post-enlightenment world, a single word can be so evil that you have to resort to code to refer to it, no matter in which context or even when you're quoting.
Yes, you shouldn't call people that way - and if you do, that is a clear sign of a racist mindset. But treating the word itself as some kind of forbidden symbol that must be purged from everything is not much better than medieval magical thinking.
Nonetheless, the continued reproduction of that word makes it "acceptable" to be used, and every time affected persons have to read that, it's bad for them.
That’s nothing new sadly, especially in academia. It used to be considered proper literary form to “translate” how people actually spoke to “proper English” and you can imagine the demographic of the people doing the “translating.”
See for example Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" [1] about one of the last living former slaves in the US. It was published a few years ago nearly a century after it was written because the author refused to white wash the subject’s language and couldn’t get it published in her life time.
Hell that criticism could easily be leveled at some of the most popular western canon like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracoon:_The_Story_of_the_...
It's one of two things:
The copyright holders are publishing new editions edited to modern sensibilities to maximize their profits by selling to a new audience.
The works are in the public domain, in which case anyone can edit up a new edition however they like, for fun or profit.
What's the alternative? We take away the right of copyright holders to publish new editions of their IP? We disallow people to edit works in the public domain?
If these conditions aren't met within a reasonable timeframe, then (by law) the original version would automatically become fully (or partially) public domain. ("Partial" public domain would mean than anyone could make or distribute copies of the original version. The copyright holders would temporarily retain the exclusive right to make edited versions, until the work fully becomes public domain when the standard copyright term lapses. At that point anyone could make and distribute the original version or their own, edited versions.)
Ideally, yes, but at a minimum he should provide a list of changes and their rationale(s) in the newer editions.
If he edited his book to rebut his own argument and lays out the case then maybe not but it should be stated in the forward that the change was made.
We are moving forward into a time where media is only digital and can be changed at will, it is important to establish a system where when we make changes we record them and also why we made the changes.
If we do not, the only future is one where information is as ethereal as the morning dew and subject to the zeitgeist of the times.
In other words, the diff between editions may be even more interesting than the either edition by itself.
If someone else changes the text on a book from a dead author... how do you know the author would have liked that?
I remember a while ago I was reading on a stage play that's supposed to be only 4~5 men (no women on the play), and the - now dead writer - specified that this should never be changed. And some ppl try to do women-only, or mixed cast, and then the writer's estate sues and tries to intervene...
The only real counter-argument I can make to the position that the author can edit his works but his heirs cannot is that the author chooses his heirs; the author could have instead chosen to will his works into the public domain after his death, or establish a trust or foundation with a strict mandate to republish his works in their original form while returning the profits to his heirs.
It's not a particularly strong argument -- many authors may not have the resources or foresight to make such provisions, and you could just as easily insist on authors who do wish their heirs to manage their works and not simply profit from them make explicit declarations on that point -- which is why I lead with the more extreme case of an author editing his own work.
I can at least talk to you about whether it's reasonable for eg Brian Herbert or (the now-late) Christopher Tolkien to continue to exercise editorial control over their fathers' works, or under what conditions a foundation could be established for the duration of the 90-years-post-author-death copyright the US currently uses.
If it's permissible for Dr Seuss's widow to inherit editorial control of her husband's work along with the copyright, can she pass that control to Dr Seuss Enterprises; if not, could Dr Seuss have established it before his death?
(Personally I think the other reply was better, in stating that it is arrogant to assume that the author's heirs do not know his wishes better than us.)
I guess the widow (or if they are still alive, the editors that worked with the author when he was alive) is the person that probably knows the author best to know if they would've liked their work to be updated or not. Or at least, make decisions on allowing changes that can have impact on how the author is seem (e.g. progressist, non-racist, sexist or not sexist, etc...).
My problem is when someone totally unrelated starts making changes, even in cases where author was explicit that they would never want the gender of their characters changed, and people go ahead and still want to change the gender
Edit: source for what I mentioned on this and my previous comment https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/beckett-waiting-for-god...
There's an obvious counterargument: how do we know [better than the author's estate] that a dead author would have been so committed to the retention of a particular stereotype or word that has acquired different connotations that they'd have angrily refused editors' suggestions they change it a bit for the next edition? In the cases discussed here, it seems particularly unlikely - would the bloke who accepted the suggestion that the workforce of African pygmies he imagined should stop being characterised as African pygmies really feel the purity of his writing was being destroyed if an even later revision made the comparatively minor switch to describing them as "people" rather than "men"?
There's an odd dichotomy between arguments that authorial intent is being destroyed by substituting or omitting a couple of words and various arguments that retaining them serves to create "teachable moments" about "how bad things use to be". With a few notable exceptions, "teachable moments" isn't at all what the author intended by a character using a word considered offensive in 2023 or casually assuming that women or foreigners were constitutionally unsuited to certain things, and generally they weren't trying to imply the character was a bigot (as modern audience might well misinterpret), or say anything at all about the contemporary attitudes incidentally referenced. Authorised translators use very non-literal translations, add or remove gender references or omit minor details that local audiences would completely misunderstand whilst living authors remain unconcerned and usually blissfully unaware; why are we so certain that the dead ones would deeply resent their publishers and estates making equally minor tweaks for the culture of 2020s English speakers?
But as you mentioned, the author's estate, family and editors that worked with them when they were alive are the ones that can probably make the best guess.
My problem is when publishers make changes even at times when authors are explicit in saying they don't want changes, without (not sure about this specific case, I'm just assuming here) getting approval from the estate
> Except it's never a faceless ... committee in practice.
> It's one of two things:
> The copyright holders are publishing new editions edited to modern sensibilities to maximize their profits by selling to a new audience.
Except that's exactly a "faceless ... committee in practice" (I elided out your injection of "authoritarian," because it missed the point).
Then the marketplaces ban the resale of old editions: https://www.newsweek.com/ebay-removes-discontinued-dr-seuss-....
And due to copyright, they have the power to effectively suppress older editions. There will be no easy way to get your hands on one other than figuring out when the changes was made (which likely wasn't publicized), then tracking down a tattered old copy on ebay.
> The works are in the public domain, in which case anyone can edit up a new edition however they like, for fun or profit.
That's not as concerning, because if the original version is public domain, it will remain easily available and bowdlerized versions are unlikely to be able to compete.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten [1], every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
[1] But originals are still kept in archives, and available upon request, so it's okay! Only a negligible number of people will bother so they may as well not exist, but it's okay!
You'd wish. In reality, custodians of each archive assumed that there are still copies in the other archives, and trashed most of the works to save money, without realizing the other archives were doing the same thing to those same works.
But it's all different committees. There's no Grand Woke High Committee dictating these changes to these works from the shadows. It's just capitalism, copyright law, and market forces.
Dr Seuss Enterprises is a private for-profit foundation established by the author's widow before her death, and while it's probably run by some sort of committee, it's a completely different committee than the board of directors at Netflix, and whatever VP heads up the Roald Dahl Story Company after its acquisition (I assume from the family, who were speaking for the company as recently as 2020).
So do we not allow the author or the author's family to set up foundations or sell their work to a corporation for half a billion dollars?
I suppose groupthink is a more likely explanation though.
* He was sickly but just worked very hard to compensate and overcome it to live an outdoors-centric life. I suffer from some undiagnosable(word?) arthritis, I work hard to still do my favorite activities (backpacking, hunting and fishing).
* He was extremely well learned, thoughtful, and articulate. He kept a detailed journal. I admire those traits and try to emulate them. I pursued a PhD, I keep a journal, I frequently write to relatives and friends. I try to be thoughtful and articulate.
* He was a legendary hunter (as I mentioned I love hunting), and conservationist. He is partly responsible for the National Parks, which I enjoy every free day (I live near Yellowstone and routinely pass under his arch).
* He was empathetic and progressive for his time [0], despite his unshaking nationalism. He didn't seem to fall for toxic tropes of conservatism (although those political terms don't translate to today, Teddy is universally celebrated by the right). I believe strongly in what I consider to be core unshaking tenets of American national identity, but I also try hard to be empathetic and make sure no one is left behind. I don't believe the answer is exclusion of outgroups, which I think is a common conservative trope today. I have a lot of respect for Teddy (with some important caveats) [1].
* He held himself, and those in government to a higher standard [2]. He believed he was a public servant, and fought tirelessly against corruption. There is nothing that makes me angrier than corruption and entitlement in political office today.
I also learned, a couple years ago, he probably would have despised me, had our paths crossed. I'm mostly Italian-American, who he openly viewed as mostly criminals [3], and even went so far as to applaud a lynching of Italian Americans in New Orleans [4].
I think it's important that I learned this. I'm glad it wasn't erased or ignored or left out of the record. I learned a few things from it. I learned (well, I already knew, but it was reinforced) that no one is perfect. No one. And that perfection is the enemy of self-improvement, it is the enemy of progress, and it is the enemy of good. There's no part of me that I'm aware of that's worse for having held TR in such high esteem and tried to emulate the great things I found about him. In fact, his example has improved my life in a variety of ways, particularly my mental health and fortitude, seeing him as an example. Sure, it made me sad to learn that fact about him, but in terms of material affect? It had no change. Words, thoughts, opinions, ideas, are necessarily flawed and incomplete as a direct result of the human condition. Pretending they are not creates two things:
1) An impossible standard
2) A false sense of security and satisfaction
I'm better at some things than TR. I don't have Italian Americans (or any minority group for that matter, my understanding was that he had similar feelings about natives). That alone is a major victory. By not having to draw myself against perfect examples, I can foster some feeling of accomplishment, but I can also learn that my idols were flawed and that even if I am flawed in many ways, I can hopefully still do some good. That's an important motivator.
A perfect example is one I will never live up to, and in that case, why even try?
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/theodore-roosevelt-mississ...
[1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/08/theodore-roosevel...
[2] snapcaster ↗ Great comment, thanks for taking the time to write that out. I think for a lot of people they look to books or other things to tell them what to think. Other people (like you it sounds like) look to books to share a story or a perspective or an idea and that engaging with the idea doesn't imply endorsing it. causi ↗ It's important to judge people in context. Just as you wouldn't think as harshly of a thief who grew up in a poor, violent household, you shouldn't think as harshly of the ignorance of a historical figure as you would of a person of today who should know better. I suspect there are many things about the people of today which the people of a century hence will regard as utterly depraved. pessimizer ↗ We're making the third choice, which is to edit the words of the people we worship in order to maintain that worship, to keep them heroic. Keeping people from idolizing racists by going back and making them not racist (so we can continue to worship the same things without guilt.) watwut ↗ Fairly often, people who lived in exactly the same time judged their contemporaries too by the exact same standards you complain about. There is this knee jerk assumption out of nowhere about pretty much any bad act by major popular figure being chalked up to their naivite or just them being product of times with zero own thinking agency. petsfed ↗ I think about the fragility of heroic personas a lot. During the peak of the 2020 protests and riots, there was a spate of statue toppling that, on their face, seemed excessive. Like various Confederate leaders, sure. But George Washington? Thomas Jefferson? tialaramex ↗ In regard specifically of statues and monuments, we should not erect statues of people but of ideas. New York has a tremendously famous statue, it is not a statue of a person, it's a statue of an idea and ideas are something we can aspire to in a way we cannot and should not for people. UncleMeat ↗ Yes, but we must use full context. Often, this is a cover for "judge people according to the prevailing views of people who held the same harmful beliefs." moomoo11 ↗ Same with a lot of historical figures. [deleted] ↗ (comment deleted) quacked ↗ > If someone else takes issue with my pov, they can also take solace in knowing I don’t respect them as people I won’t ever acknowledge. watwut ↗ The logical conclusion of your comment is that you never cared about heroes of his ethnicity, do not respect them and do not care. You never paid attention to them. quacked ↗ I don't know what his ethnicity is, so I don't know if I know the heroes of his ethnicity or not. I know an unusual amount about world history and non-western cultures compared to the average person with my general characteristics, so I believe it unlikely that I "never paid attention" or "don't care". thx-2718 ↗ "Speaking as a Black man from America, which is a racist society, no matter how much you hear it talk about democracy, it's as racist as South Africa or as racist as Portugal, or as racist as any other racialist society on this earth. The only difference between it and South-Africa: South-Africa preaches separation and practices separation; America preaches integration and practices segregation. This is the only difference. They don't practice what they preach, whereas South-Africa preaches and practices the same thing. I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil" californiadreem ↗ >He’s dead so I don’t really care. If someone else takes issue with my pov, they can also take solace in knowing I don’t respect them as people I won’t ever acknowledge. [dead] moomoo11 ↗ [flagged] dang ↗ Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for—regardless of how bad or provocative another commenter is, or you feel it is. moomoo11 ↗ I apologize. Thank you. dang ↗ Personal attacks like this will get you banned on HN. No more of this, please. californiadreem ↗ But is this actually a personal attack or pointing out a fact and providing an opportunity for introspection? dang ↗ "You seem to lack the restraint of a normal civilized person" is unquestionably a personal attack and the sort of thing we ban accounts for, so please don't do that again. Aloha ↗ Agreed, on whole. blacksmith_tb ↗ This piece on TR's African Safari and its impact on his views was posted recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35108692 Aloha ↗ I do wonder what would have happened had TR won in 1912. Tade0 ↗ > undiagnosable(word?) mandevil ↗ I might get down-voted for this, but I totally understand why Netflix, who bought the Dahl Company in 2021, is editing these stories. OfSanguineFire ↗ In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how foreigners look and how they speak Chinese. The Chinese don’t see such poking fun as a problem, nor do a great many other peoples on earth. Parts of Western culture, like yourself feeling such things interrupted the flow of the Dahl book, are the odd ones out here, and one might ask oneself if it has to be this way. Of course, I agree that there are powerful corporate motivations to avoid anything that might turn off potential consumers. civilitty ↗ Moral relativism aside, there’s a taboo against “punching down” in humor and comedy. It’s obviously a fuzzy heuristic but in general, people from Western imperial powers making fun of the people they’ve exploited is pretty far in the unacceptable column. OfSanguineFire ↗ Even that taboo against punching down is a peculiarity of (some parts of) modern Western culture. The blind, deaf, crippled, and mentally retarded are a favourite butt of jokes all over the world. amanaplanacanal ↗ Kindness and compassion seem to be lacking in that kind of behavior. Are those only western values? I don’t think so. bluefirebrand ↗ More and more, I find that sugar coating everything and coddling everyone is not kind or compassionate. amanaplanacanal ↗ “No really, us making fun of you is actually for your benefit.” kelnos ↗ There's a difference between poking fun and outright bigotry, though. I'm not saying Dahl is one thing and the Chinese media is another, but I think we need to look harder at all of these things to figure out what place it's coming from. a_techwriter_00 ↗ In terms of ethnicity, isn't China something like 91% Han Chinese? I wonder if that has anything to do with the incentive structure behind why their media denigrates other races. californiadreem ↗ The irony being that if the public domain had actually been 28 years as it was originally legislated back in the 18th century in the United States, this kind of change wouldn't be controversial. People would be likely used to maintaining cultural media to keep it both relevant and free of changing taboos. And it would likely be decentralized enough that there wouldn't be any single Authorized Version except that which the original author published. wiredfool ↗ Yah, and there are others with issues. Lots of others. The Little House books for one. oska ↗ > So I started to read Charlie and the Glass Elevator to him and stopped only a few pages in when some very offensive caricatures of Chinese people talking in English showed up. downWidOutaFite ↗ Historical accuracy is very different than works of fiction whose purpose is mostly entertainment. COGlory ↗ The works of fiction that are still being published today are in fact historical events in and of themselves.
Also, everyone wants to think that they would be the brave resistance fighter when in fact most of us don't "choose" sides in any meaningful sense and just go along with the status quo. I think seeing these really smart and progressive (for their time) people and what their blind spots were despite their brilliance can help me look inwards and see where I might be a "man of my time" and missing something later generations will judge me for
Instead we should just be adult, and recognize that being racist isn't an entire person, it's a component of a person that may have other components that are deeply admirable. The refusal to admit that causes difficulties for people whose almost entire academic life consisted of the study of the works of racists. Deleting their racism from history is a comfortable solution for people still living off the wealth that their racist ancestors accumulated.
Sometimes it is the case, but also plenty of times these were conscious decisions or strongly criticized by contemporaries.
But it turns out that George Washington owned a lot of slaves. Jefferson has a very complicated and questionable history with slavery in particular. I learned a bit about Robert E. Lee's history of slave ownership, and it's directly at odds with what I was taught in school. Its worth investigating if you've time.
I eventually landed on this idea that there are specific acts that we should encourage our children to emulate, but there is no entire person that any children should aspire to emulate. Oskar Schindler, we should recall, was a member of the Nazi Party (and, I'm surprised to learn from wikipedia, was employed by the Nazi intelligence organization, and was convicted of spying on Czechoslovakia for the Nazis, prior to the German occupation).
I am troubled by the idea that we should always forgive and forget, as it were, the things that get people canceled today. Yes, people change, and a questionable tweet by an 18 year old should not dog them in perpetuity until the end of their life. But on the other hand, I feel like we should not grant blanket pardon for people who have not sought to redress their own sins, and sincerely apologized. E.g. Donald Trump's past is littered with exceptionally bad behavior, and it seems he never expresses contrition, but always asks that the public set aside that bad behavior.
Courthouses often feature Lady Justice, who likewise is an idea. We might erect more statues of Hope, and of Beauty, we have built many symbolic tombs said to contain an "Unknown soldier", again symbolising an idea, not the individual even in cases where a specific unidentified corpse has been entombed.
The classic example is slavery in the US, where people often speak about slaveholders like there wasn't a large abolition movement and an entire population of black people who identified slavery is evil. The context must also include the people who were oppressed by these systems and beliefs.
In school people worshipped figures like Winston Churchill.
Later I learned he thought of brown people as subhuman savages. He would not respect me if I took a Time Machine to his era.
He was a product of his time. Learn his strategical thinking and grant him for his confidence and love for country.
Beyond that I will never respect him as a man. He’s dead so I don’t really care. If someone else takes issue with my pov, they can also take solace in knowing I don’t respect them as people I won’t ever acknowledge.
This is a strange perspective. Do you think if I went through the heroes of your own ethnicity that I would find exclusively people with noble moral systems that would respect me and what I stand for? Should I "refuse to acknowledge" you if you admire your culture's historical figures in opposition to my dislike of them, or their dislike of me?
So, it sounds symmetrical and fair?
I am more interested in examining the moral double-standard implied by his comment, that it is just for him to refuse to acknowledge me if I admire Churchill, but that he would find it unjust if I refused to acknowledge him because he admired <hero from his own culture with beliefs I didn't like>.
- Malcolm X
With Churchill I suppose people knew how he felt about them.
You seem to lack the restraint of a normal civilized person. I think there's a word for that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I’m ESL and sometimes I forget my tone comes off as crass. I will try better.
Also, please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
He declared, unsourced and uncited, that Winston Churchill thought that people with "brown skin" were "subhuman savages." He then declared that because Churchill had these supposed opinions, he was not worthy of any human decency, that he was in effect a subhuman.
Furthermore, he declared that anyone who had any issue with that assessment had a share by contagion of Churchill's unpersoning. That's not civilized or cultured. There is a word for that.
A core trait of civilization is that members are entitled to the rights of citizens, which almost categorically include equal protection under the law and in the West a recognition of a shared humanity even among those that aren't citizens.
More explicitly, this is a trait of Christian civilizations. Churchill, who did believe in a developmental hierarchy, also believed that Anglo-Saxons were superior to other peoples because they had this categorical understanding of human value.
If someone arbitrarily rejects this core aspect of civilization (i.e. lacking in it), attempts to dehumanize those who do have it in a combative and dismissive manner is by definition a savage.
If pointing out that words mean things results in warnings and threats of bans, then I don't want to be a part of your circus anyway. I hope your city and industry meet the fate it deserves.
I gather from your reply that you didn't intend it that way! and that's fine - except that what matters is how the comment lands with a reasonable reader. Readers don't have access to your intent - it's in your head, not ours - so the burden is on you (i.e. all of us) to disambiguate your intent explicitly.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(Btw, please don't do religious, ideological, and/or nationalistic flamewar on HN. Your comment here has elements of all three. We want curious conversation here, and that sort of flamewar is the antithesis of it, so we have to be proactive about trying to avoid it.)
Humans need heroes, we need people to believe in, to aspire to - but we should never forget that our heroes are humans - and imperfect humans at that.
One of my biggest issues with the new puritanism, is we dont let people evolve either - once you've done one bad thing - no matter what redemption or evolution you have later in life - you're just the guy who did the bad thing.
Generally also, I think its bad to judge historical figures by current norms too.
Like on TR - TR's views on... well pretty much everything evolved over time too (he notably became more progressive and more radical in that progressivism with age).
His views on race evolved too as far as I know too (though I dont have sources handy to talk about it).
Perhaps "subclinical"?
I agree that it is important to have a full and complete historical record, but Netflix is interested in making money, and I recently read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my six year old and he loved it. So I started to read Charlie and the Glass Elevator to him and stopped only a few pages in when some very offensive caricatures of Chinese people talking in English showed up. And I haven't read my son any more Dahl since then, because I was genuinely shocked at what I had just read, stopped that book after that chapter, and went off to read something else instead, and haven't gotten around to James and the Giant Peach or Matilda again. It interrupted what could have been a lovely flow of Dahl books. So I can understand why the people who control the Dahl Company- and desperately want people like me to read his stories to people like my son- are stealth-editing them to kill the offensive stuff, so that I will buy more books, read them to my son, and then he will 30 years from now buy them and read them to his children because they have nostalgic value for him: they remind him of his dad reading to him.
This censorship isn't happening because of the iron hand of the state or anything like that. It's the result of people making choices within a capitalist system. It's because I have lots of great stories to choose from to read to my six year old, so why would I choose one that I have to explain lots of ugly bigotry? So Netflix is choosing to try and sand down those problems that might keep someone like me from reading the book to my kid, in a totally understandable way. And, as the rights owner trying to maximize revenue, that is their prerogative.
A caricature of a French, British, or German person in American media, for example, is much more acceptable than a caricature of a Chinese person.
I'm not saying that we should be going out of our way to make fun of everyone every chance we get, but this idea that "oh, those people are different so they are off limits for jokes or criticism" is a good way to make sure those people never develop any level of resilience.
And even then, poking fun, to me, is a personal thing. There are poking-fun-type things I might say to a close friend that I would never say to an acquaintance. Making fun of a random-stranger foreigner who is doing you the honor of trying to learn your language is just mean-spirited, no matter how you look at it. Makes me wonder about the kind of people who would do that. As to your specific statement:
> In Chinese media it is common to make fun of how foreigners look and how they speak Chinese.
To me that just sounds like propaganda. The Chinese media is promoting the idea of Chinese superiority. "All those people from other nations look funny, and are too stupid to speak our language properly." Anecdotally, an ethnically-Chinese friend of mine who lived in China for a few years (and traveled around the country quite a bit) used to tell me that many, many native-born Chinese people speak Mandarin poorly, some to the point of being difficult to understand. So poking fun at foreigners for their bad Chinese is ironic, perhaps to the point of being a little sad.
Couldn't you have just skipped over this bit? Or paraphrased it to your child? I understand that you may have been just reading along and found yourself reading out 'bad stuff' but for me, that would just be the point where I would have stopped and done either of the two options above (skip or summarise).
I find it kind of fascinating that this article is fine with the changes made to Ursula K. LeGuin's work, but is up in arms over Dahl and Fleming and Christie getting a de-upper-class-twitification. Why is this particular shit so sacred to the Post's "editorial board"?
There are many people who agree with me. It's "sacred" to the Post because the people writing for the Post believe these works have a place in the literary canon. People in society possess systems of morals that directly contradict each other.
It's a case of changing the meaning of the statement vs translating the vocabulary to more accurately reflect the original meaning. Editing Lord of the Rings so Frodo tosses another bundle of sticks onto the fire doesn't alter the meaning. His example from Death on the Nile is straight-up altering the personality of a character to make her a better person.
I agree fully, but for me the difference is between something being groan-worthy and something being sacrilege. I don't object when someone translates a work into another language.
Spoiled children of privilege work at publishers because no one else can afford degrees from the right colleges, then move on to working for free in New York, or being handed the job by a friend of a friend. They have no concept of art that doesn't involve seeing themselves "reflected" in it, and they think "inclusion" is them allowing other types of people to see themselves in art (and they think that they should be praised for this "tolerance" and "celebration" of "identities.")
Real inclusion is having a system that includes people working in it that aren't all from the same flaky class, and with the new addition of queer identities, all of your diversity can consist of wealthy straight white people (there's barely any reason to pretend to be Native American, Hispanic, or black anymore.) Their awful scribbles on the works of their superiors (the significantly less narcissistic privileged white people of the past) age like fish, and their work will be seen by relatively normal people from the future as bowdlerized works are seen now: as birdcage liner.
Isn't that "impressive level of entitlement" a basic requirement for translation? It does take artistry to make a translation. Even if you're not going for a literary result, there are always going to be meanings that exist (or can be expressed efficiently) on one language but not the other. Then there are idioms and cultural references.
That is correct way of translating and not an violation. If the original author wrote the book with contemporary style, pleasant to read to people at the time, proper translation will produce contemporary text.
There is no reason to use archaisms or outdated language in translation if the original author was not using archaisms or outdated language.
But I wouldn't know how to translate that to Dutch; there simple aren't archaic words that mean the same, AFAIK, so you will have to convey that feeling in another way. Or what more often happens is that it will just get lost – and that's okay as a translation will never be the same as the original in any case.
(Aside: I also think that no one is "offended" by these sort of words, as they deliberately co-opted archaic words for their movements; everyone understands that older writings will use these words in their original meaning and no one has a problem with that. If you do, then you're a rather queer person IMO.)
You can think that a particular translation is poor, but there isn't a choice between a translation that does and does not add the artistry of the translator.
I agree with this, however at a certain point we have to be pragmatic and avoid the perfect being the enemy of the good. These works are often never put into context. Sometimes that is because a child is reading the work themselves. Sometimes it is because the government is actively trying to make it illegal to provide that context.
Therefore I wonder if it is just easier to remove a word here and there when it is mostly irrelevant to the story. Changing "natives" to "locals" or "fat" to "enormous" doesn't change anything material about those works. If anything it makes the original more accessible because it removes a potential distraction for a modern reader.
It seems a little weird to me to be so dogmatic about the importance of preserving the exact original text as in many instances those were in flux too. The fact that the article uses Oompa Loompas as an example is especially strange considering the version the article wants to preserve is already a politically correct update of the original in which they were more clearly African slaves.
We all know that controlling language is a form of power and that's the entire point of these revisions. Whoever controls the language controls the masses, it has been said. Destroy whatever was important and sacred to the culture you're colonizing and/or destroying. The first step is to change the meaning of words. And of course, it's "for the children".
I don't buy this slippery slope argument. Where does it end? It ends wherever the rights holders of the books say it ends. If you want them to change a word you think is offensive, try to convince them to change it.
>We all know that controlling language is a form of power and that's the entire point of these revisions. Whoever controls the language controls the masses, it has been said. Destroy whatever was important and sacred to the culture you're colonizing and/or destroying. The first step is to change the meaning of words. And of course, it's "for the children".
This is a rather hyperbolic claim for changing a few sentences in a story about kids visiting a chocolate factory. No one is "controlling the masses" with Roald Dahl books. This isn't about changing the history books. It is ensuring that stories can still be enjoyed in the same way they were originally without being burdened with either an accompanied history lesson or what we now view as bigotry.
Yeah, let's ratchet it up and take the culture war into absolutely everything. It's a bad precedent. You've already seen the right now taking up the left's tactics and it's not the kind of place anyone wants to be in.
> This isn't about changing the history books.
That's has been happening too! Revise so that everything was bad and everything we are doing is good.
> what we now view as bigotry.
"We"? who is "we"? If someone doesn't like our culture and wants their own then they should invent it. They are interlopers that should stop trying to take our culture and changing it to suit their belief system. They need to create their own idols and gods if the existing ones don't suit their arbitrary, new standard.
What are you suggesting here? Should we curtail free speech by either restricting how a copyright holder can edit their work or that protests against those copyright holders should be limited?
>That's has been happening too! Revise so that everything was bad and everything we are doing is good.
What are you suggesting here? Should history never be reevaluated with modern context?
>"We"? who is "we"?
Society
> If someone doesn't like our culture and wants their own then they should invent it. They are interlopers that should stop trying to take our culture and changing it to suit their belief system. They need to create their own idols and gods if the existing ones don't suit their arbitrary, new standard.
I imagine this isn't your intent, but this might not even be indirect enough to be considered a dog whistle. Comments like "They are interlopers that should stop trying to take our culture" are exact phrases we might expect in a racist manifesto. Considering the topic at hand and your previous questioning of my use of pronouns, maybe be a little more cautious about your "our"s and "they"s.
You are the one who is setting up a direct link between free thinking and bigotry. You might be telling on yourself.
It's telling you use "copyright holder" and not "author". I wouldn't be against a law that forced them to slap a big "Edited without author's permission" label on such falsified books.
I also don't buy your implied argument that if we can't find a perfect legislative solution to a problem, we shouldn't complain about it in the first place.
No it’s not. It’s a fringe minority of very active and loud people. Taken to a vote the popular cause would reject the abandonment and destruction and desecration of our cultural artifacts.
> I imagine this isn't your intent, but this might not even be indirect enough to be considered a dog whistle.
My intent is that there is an active interest in destroying liberal western tradition and culture. Destroying our cultural artifacts is a front on that war. It’s not that I mind the war but rather that the instigators hide behind rhetoric like “it’s just a book” when it’s actually a malignant problem.
I will defend my culture - that is, the culture that I believe interlopers are trying to destroy by throwing the baby out with the bath water. The culture that through its generosity, politeness, and respect has been taken advantage of and had these values used against it.
Honestly what I fear most is the reaction.
I'm not associating American culture with white supremacy. You are using the exact same rhetoric that white supremacists use. I don't know if you are just trolling me, if you are a legitimate white supremacist, or if you are just completely ignorant of your rhetoric.
In case it is the latter, I will be clear and direct and tell you that white supremacists use the same terms and phrases you use about "interlopers" waging "war" against and "destroying liberal western tradition and culture". If you aren't one, you really should be more mindful about how you speak on this subject. There are ways to convey your views without coming off like a bigot trying to watch their words which is exactly what you sound like in these last few comments.
What I’m saying is defacing history is bad. Defiling it is bad. It is an affront to our culture and our artifacts and it matters. Create NEW culture with original ideas but don’t vandalize what exists and is important to people. Don’t attempt to change history. Make new history with original ideas. Appropriating existing cultural artifacts isn’t the way.
Then just don't make changes, and trust that your readers are capable of withstanding raw, unfiltered, uncensored exposure to words from a different time and place. You don't need to "protect" people from wrong opinions, and they don't want to be protected
If a work is written by a racist author, changing a few words isn't magically going to make the author not racist. Their opinions will have influenced the entire story. The article clearly demonstrates this with the Death on the Nile example: the entire work is based on the framework of British colonialism, removing a few racist stereotypes isn't going to change anything about that! At best, you end up pretending that racism never existed - which isn't exactly a great thing to teach children either.
Works like that should be provided as-is, with the required context as to why the work is the way it is. If we want to provide children with works that are more up-to-date with today's society, then start providing newer works. It's not as if nobody has written a book in the last few decades!
It's a political pamphlet, not a novel.
Peter Singer?
I do not wish to see society remade by the vision of the modern western progressive, and so I don't want progressive edits to books I loved as a child.
Edit: Editing books allows progressives to simultaneously avoid the label of "book banning", which they at least claim to detest, while also constructing an incorrect image of the people of the past to aid in the moral instruction of modern children. It is the same story, over and over again, whether it's communists or religious people: "you cannot have access to information that contradicts the moral worldview we wish you to have. This is for your own safety and for the good of your fellow man."
The original Shakespeare is still available, but most people read/watch adaptations or revisions (partly because Shakespeare's English has long gone).
So, as long as the originals haven't been burnt by the good people of Florida, who cares about the updates?
When the books are censored the opposite happens. The original in the people's mind changes and the original nuances of the art is lost. Moreover we lose our understanding of progress. The change of the worldview and the values is an important part of understanding art.
If we would like to show the progress we made and our current values, we should create our own classics for generations to read and understand us, rather than muddying the water between us and the previous generations.
Please show me where all the book burnings are taking place.
Please show me where librarians are being threatened physically for stocking the originals.
Please show me where laws are being made preventing you from owning/accessing a copy of the original.
This one is just called "intellectual property rights". If you don't already have a copy of the original, you won't be able to get one if the rightsholder chooses to withdraw it from sale.
Also in no other industry is a company forced to sell you a version of anything, otherwise where can I buy me a brand new Ford AC Cobra
Nobody is preventing anyone from accessing the original version.
The publisher is not, and should not, be forced by anyone to produce any version at all.
If you had been an author you would understand that selling your rights to a publisher is no guarantee that the book will even be printed, there have been numerous examples over the decades of rights being acquired for a work and then never exercised such that that work is never published (this is especially common with movie rights),
Complaining that you as an author want to retain a right on editorial actions is fine if you dont sell that right. But if you were an author you would know that that doesn't always happen.
Complaining as a consumer makes very little sense. It's fine to air your grievance, but the truth is you have no right on what is produced at all.
Do you agree with art being instrumentalized and turned into something that can be ”retouched for the greater good” by the hands of people who couldn’t possibly publish a single successful blog post? Would you let HN mods retouch your comment if they found something offensive in it (for whatever spurious criteria happened to be trendy at any given time)? Those are all questions you should ask yourself.
I live in a country where the children’s lullabies have been butchered and changed into bland, uninteresting versions of the originals, which were amazing records of cultural heritage. That heritage has been denied to my children (I try to sing the original ones but the school uses the new versions and so they don’t want to hear mine). They also use gender neutral pronouns and forbid us to take pictures in events but that’s a topic for another time.
When works go out of print they become rare and hard to find. There are only 200 or so original prints of the First Folio in existence; Shakespeare is kept alive by subsequent reprintings. When publishers "update" old works for modern sensibilities, it's with an eye toward replacing the old version with the new; they simply refuse to publish the old version. If it's a print book it'll still be there, but become slowly harder and harder to obtain until it's nearly impossible, and most people don't even remember it anyway[0]. If it's an e-book, it's as good as gone; anyone who still has it has committed a felony to preserve it. Long copyright terms help enormously with this.
Some books don't even get replaced. The word "nerd" is thought to have originated from the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo; Seuss's publisher has decided the book is too racist to continue to be in print, so it too has gone on to book afterlife.
[0] The black pygmy Oompa-Loompas were almost a "Mandela effect" thing for me; my school library had a 1960s edition of the book. Only when I read about the changes later in life was I like "Oh, so that's why the Oompa-Loompas are different."
The copyright OWNERS are to be denied their rights to do with their property what they wish?
Further, they're forced to print some version of their property?
Honestly, no, books go in and out of print all day long, and first editions have always been 'collectible' because they're 'original'
Changes/edits happen all the time (hell some authors keep web pages of errata because their originals require updating), just that the edits in question have people clutching their pearls.
Copyright shouldn't extend such an absurdly long time as to affect most of these books.
It's made zero difference to the original (which has been out of print for decades)
Yes. The purpose of copyright is to protect and promote cultural works, that's why governments instituted it. If the institution is no longer serving its purpose, it should be reformed
In the UK the purpose of copyright was originally to give the King's approved publishers a monopoly on published material. The copyright was literally a right to copy, to operate a printing press.
Even today, in France copyright is seen as a droit d'auteur, a moral right to a work you have simply by being the author of the work. Forget promoting cultural works for the public's benefit. As the author you are entitled even to determine who may even see the work, and how they may see it. You can go full Prince and lock your magnum opus in a vault, that is a right that is legally and morally respected.
It's only in the USA where the justification of copyright is to "promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts", and so we feel entitled to other people's work.
I'm not saying the copyright owners are to be denied anything, only that it's a crying shame they're doing what they're doing. They are within their rights to do so, and given that just about all public companies have ESG rules they need to adhere to, there may not have been a realistic alternative.
It's a crying shame that George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney, who proceeded to dismantle the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. It's a crying shame that after the failure of the Amico, the current rightsholders to Intellivision are selling off their game IPs piecemeal, preventing another collection like Intellivision Lives from happening. But everyone involved in these actions is acting within their rights to the IP in question.
It would be like someone deciding that only the NIV of the bible can be bought from now on, and the KJV wouldn't be sold any more and all e-book versions of the KJV would be updated. For modern readers the NIV is clearly the better translation IMO, but there's obviously also a lot of value in having the KJV around (as well as other editions).
I also have some gripes with some specific edits they made – at times it feels like they weren't even trying to replace the original with something decent and some edits are ridiculous – but that's more minor. The biggest problem was the "here are the new versions and these are the versions everyone should have and the original versions never existed" kind of attitude they seemed to have.
Politically motivated changes might sometimes be ridiculous, but there's also the real need to update forgotten words, or words that have drastically changed their meaning.
At least it's not done with the same level of fanaticism as Iceland's war against foreign loanwords, for example.
The example with "fat" Augustus Gloop becoming "enormous" - that's actually a good thing, regardless of the politics involved! The causes of obesity were poorly understood back then, partially due to the sugar industry's lobbying. There's no need to propagate this misunderstanding to the next generation in a book for young people.
Edit: Wow - this is a downvote magnet! Go and try reading Beowulf in the original Old English, or something.
Far from guaranteed, with today's ever-lengthening copyright terms, and DMCA making it a felony to keep original versions around.
I am fat, and the sugar industry has nothing to do with it. I don't like sugar, or sweet food in general; I eat healthy, old-fashioned home-cooked meals prepared from zero-sugar raw ingredients - they just happen to be consistently bigger meals than a stressed out software engineer with a low physical activity level ought to be eating. So the weight increases.
There is a sane medium to be found somewhere between the "fat person = greedy and evil person" trope of 20th century fiction, and today's "fat person = innocent, agency-less victim of the Big Sugar conspiracy" trope.
If a book had an idiot villain character who was portrayed as a villain for something that is very central to my identity, I think maybe that could make me offended. I haven't seen one yet.
And you know what? His Cinderella was fucking terrible and I’ve been waiting decades to have a platform to point that out. His original IPs are way better than his retellings. Glad to get that off my chest.
I'd rather see people retell the story without the stuff they see as problems. Get at the heart of the story and tell it better. (IIRC, this is what happened in Shakespeare's time.)
But no one is going to do that. It's more work and everyone is looking to do this as cheaply as possible to make more money.
Actually, most of the refusal is because of copyrights.
It’s perfectly legal to take something someone else wrote and write something similar.
Otherwise Star Trek Deep Space Nine would have infringed on Babylon 5.
Isn't that what happened with the more famous version of "The Princess Bride" (the one that ended up made into a movie)?
I can't find much reason to alter Agatha Christie or Ian Fleming though, since those books are intended for adults.
It's absurd, it's tacky, and it won't age well.
Often these edits are about preserving the creator's intent. If an author used a word that was inoffensive a hundred years ago and is now offensive, it is more in line with the author's intent to change the word to the modern inoffensive equivalent than to preserve the offensive one that now conveys something different from what it meant to the author.
I would not want my work rewritten in any manner after my death, if still associated with my name. Folks are free to write their own materials that properly reflect their vocabulary values. And if they’re any good, the free market will surely do its work.
Sure, and maybe the author had deeply held beliefs about typefaces and would be appalled that a user can now choose their own typeface on a Kindle. At a certain point, it is a little silly to try to fully understand and preserve every intent of the author. But a character going from good person to a racist due to nothing but the aging of their language is a pretty dramatic alteration of an author's intent that is easy to identify and rectify.
>And if they’re any good, the free market will surely do its work.
Do realize this is exactly what's happening here? These new versions are happening because of capitalistic reasons in that it is harder to sell a book that has a bunch of accidental bigotry in it.
The character is not going from a good person to a racist a due to their language. The character (in my scenario) remains entirely unchanged. What has changed is your (and most modern reader’s) perception of the character.
Which is part of the point. Characters exist in the world they inhabit, not yours or mine or anyone else’s. A huge part of the artistic experience is reinterpreting and reframing the meaning of a work as society develops.
Emotional and moral complexity is a goal in literature, not a bug.
> Do realize this is exactly what's happening here? These new versions are happening because of capitalistic reasons in that it is harder to sell a book that has a bunch of accidental bigotry in it.
Again I must gently disagree. First off, it’s not “accidental bigotry”. It’s bigotry reflective of the time in which it was written. Today in America we find it very difficult to view someone who uses the N word as an unequivocally “good” person. Was that the case in 1830?
Re: publishers releasing revised copies — they’re a business, and business often undercuts artistic intention for a profit. So it goes. If you want to say “I have no problem with rights holders revising (someone else’s) work to which they hold a copyright, to remove challenging remnants of the past and better reflect the vocabulary of today, so they sell better” — I agree 100% that’s well within their rights (however much I dislike that state of affairs).
But please don’t attribute their edits to “preserving authorial intent”. That’s putting (even more) words in the mouths of the dead.
Is this always the intent of the author? Sometimes authors want their characters to live in a world that is identical to ours.
>A huge part of the artistic experience is reinterpreting and reframing the meaning of a work as society develops.
Is this always the intent of the author? Reinterpreting work based on things that occurred since its creation seems to produce and inherent disconnect with what the author intended in the moment.
>Emotional and moral complexity is a goal in literature, not a bug.
Is this always the intent of the author? Not every story needs to be about every complex topic. We don't need to deal with slavery and child abuse for example in a story about a chocolate factory. The book already has its own complex topics that it directly intended to address.
>Again I must gently disagree. First off, it’s not “accidental bigotry”. It’s bigotry reflective of the time in which it was written.
Is this always the intent of the author? Not every author wants their work to be reflective of a specific moment in time. Some stories are meant to be timeless.
>But please don’t attribute their edits to “preserving authorial intent”. That’s putting (even more) words in the mouths of the dead.
You are also putting words in the mouth of the dead by assuming the answer to those above questions. I don't know why one side of this debate gets to claim they speak for the dead with perfect accuracy.
There is only one of us who is suggesting that changing the words in an author’s work after their death is a Good Idea. I am suggesting that the words be left alone entirely, given the objective impossibility of knowing a dead author’s original intent (so ably demonstrated by your excellent use of repetition!).
You desire (or at least accept) altering the original material without regard to the original author’s wishes. That is your right. But such an argument would seem to require justification for the change. Leaving something as is generally does not.
This difference in our positions explains why you perceive me as “speaking for the dead with perfect accuracy” while saying you do not. I am not speaking for the dead. I am letting them speak for themselves and pushing back against those who would alter their message.
You are operating under the assumption that they’d rather their work continue to generate profit for modern businesses, and would accept editing accordingly. Maybe. Maybe not. But boy is it frustrating to hear endless arguments supporting altering existing work to line other people’s pockets, with any suggestion of “write something new, yourself, if it bothers you” being blown off with “this is what they would want”.
Especially grating: the fact that this argument almost always comes out of those who have not generated any such material themselves. Perhaps if they did, they would begin to understand how carefully each word is chosen in any work possessing enough quality to last through the ages.
I.e. preserving historical architecture is not about restoring the building to how we believe it was supposed to be shown - otherwise, the Egyptian pyramids would have gotten back their white finish and gold tip long ago.
Instead, we recognise that those buildings are from a different time and try to highlight the feats of that time that make them remarkable still today.
GP isn't even advocating that. They're advocating redoing the finish with marble, or with frameless glass windows, because that would be the modern equivalent to what those buildings were to people in ancient Egypt.
I'm inclined to think they do, actually.
Often the revisions soften the weirdness or offensiveness of outdated mores, beliefs and customs, but by blurring them out, you miss a teaching opportunity: explaining how things were, how things are now, and why they changed.
It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain, prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do. Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand the world. And I think that's doing them a solid.
Is there any indication that children who were read those stories from hundreds of years ago ended up kind, caring, mentally resilient, etc...with whatever traits parents want to instill in their children today?
Always supposing you _can_ still buy a 20th century version. Maybe I wouldn't feel so ambivalent about this editorialising if the editors committed to keeping both versions current
I think we will have no problem finding the 20th century versions.
Just ask a random librarian or archivist how easy it is to find copies of local newspapers from 20+ years ago. Hint: often it's not possible, as the last library trashed its microfiche, in a mistaken belief that someone else surely digitized it already.
> Newspapers have always been ephemeral - books have not been.
To a degree, yes. But then it's also been long recognized that local newspapers are a critical, extremely valuable window into the past. That alone justifies keeping archived copies - and I'm not talking about filling every libraries full of archival copies of major newspapers, but rather couple institutions keeping microfilms or digitized versions. As it turns out, those institutions end up assuming that the burden of preservation belongs to someone else, and this diffused responsibility leads to those "archived works" being lost forever.
> What would happen in Dahl's case is the price on the used book market would start trending upwards for the 20th century version, and at some point someone would decide to do another version to cash in and satisfy the demand.
Maybe, but I'm not sure if this holds in general, even for works of high notoriety. There may be some interest for the old edition, but if the new edition is good enough, there might be too few a people interested in the old one to make a reprint profitable.
Or at least this is how it was before. These days, the cost of storing and delivering digital copies is near-zero, print-on-demand works even for niche works and very small audiences - but there's also so much content that the work could disappear simply because nobody cared about that work in particular enough to bother keeping a copy. Bytes may be cheap, but human attention is not.
Sjimmie (the black kid) also spoke in broken Dutch, and was generally the stupid one.
Even as a 10 year old I recognized it was pretty racist, because I grew up in an environment where this sort of thing is frowned upon.
In the end you can only know about racism if you actually know what it looks like, up close, and without filter. When is too young "too young" for this? I don't know, but I think you're giving children too little credit; they're not entirely stupid. People in the past didn't become racist because of a few books or comics, they became racist due to the general culture at the time, and stuff like this is more a consequence of that than a cause.
(The comic was revamped in the 70s to not be racist by the way, and these new comics were very popular in the 80s and 90s, but the originals were never revised or updated: they just made new, better, non-racist ones.)
It is absolutely fine to tell the kids truth about history, including the fact that these or that popular people were widely cruel, racist or sexist or defrauded or whatever. But that is something completely different then giving the kid fictional story with schematic characters and claim that kid should learn facts about historical society from it.
> It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain, prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do. Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand the world. And I think that's doing them a solid.
Fun fact: censorship in the past was actually the thing. For example, German censorship during WWI made it unprintable to reference death in kids literature.
Second, quite a lot of what was collected as fairly tales was not intended for toddlers and little four years old children the way we use them. Not just because of violence, they are just not structured for small kids, they are overly long and boring to them. They were for older children, stories then older people/youth told each other for fun. And in the past, what kids were actually pushed into were fairly often educational texts with clear moral learnings.
They did not had movies in the past. There was no Marvel, no Game of Thrones. And quite a lot of these stories are contemporary equivalent of Game of Thrones - except shorter.
These edits (as shown in the article) seem to do more to make good books bad - if the edits enhance sensitivity or not, is an aside.
But perhaps your childhood was different.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler
And I agree with your point, and that it extends well beyond the 20th century back to the day of patrons and benefactors who would support a creative endeavor.
Let's consider a cultural work. If I make a poem, it's covered under copyright. Suppose the local library posts it on the wall for a season, for anyone to come by and read.
Libraries like to promote local culture, so they rotate things out so others get a chance to show their work. At the end of the season, my work comes down.
I take it home and file it for later. Perhaps I'm looking for a publisher but it takes a few years to find one.
It's now much harder to find in its original form.
That withdrawal from the public sphere does not revoke my copyright, nor should it revoke my copyright.
Instead of worrying about the country being founded by bourgeoisie supremacists whose writing the country still uses as its foundation…let’s worry if Mount Rushmore or Jefferson get “cancelled”. If they aren’t cancelled, what of all the dead victims of the exclusionary foundation of the country?
Meanwhile people discussing the topic question if the book is improved. This has nothing to do with the topic. Assuming we've change your words, have you say something else, should there be a discussion pondering if we've improved you?
Our society has been doing this for a long time. My beloved Hardy Boy childhood books were actually the edited version - edited to remove racial stereotypes, says Wikipedia, and to target a different audience.
(Investigating now, the changes were extensive! Compare the 1927 "The Secret of the Old Mill " https://archive.org/details/the-secret-of-the-old-mill/page/... with the 1962 version at https://archive.org/details/secretofoldmil00fran/page/n15/mo... .)
The 1981 revised edition of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was edited (posthumously) to remove sexist stereotypes, like replace "insurance man" with "insurance agent", and drop the section on dealing with one's wife.
> Should we only consume media that we agree with?
There are many reasons to edit a book. The Hardy Boy books were edited to generate profit from an existing franchise.
The editors of the 1981 edition of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" argue that keeping the 'quaint and dated' references weaken 'the important message and overall impact' of the book. https://archive.org/details/howtowinfriendsi0000carn/page/14... .
Neither particularly fit your description of "everything has to be sunshine and rainbows".
It's dysfunctional toxic behavior packaged as doing good.
I've seen a theory as to where this is coming from. The particular university, as do many universities, have an inflated administration where some even have more staff than students. A significant part of that staff is DEI and pretty much everybody is to commit to this agenda.
So, you have a huge amount of people that continuously need to show evidence that they're committed to the cause. What would be the easiest thing to do?
You type in a bunch of bullshit in Word, because that's far easier than working in a soup kitchen. Actually improving the world is hard so instead you do this easy thing that provides the optics, and nothing more. You don't even need to believe it, it's largely driven by fear.
It's like an engine that can't be stopped.
Had you ever discussed applying democratic values to the evaluation of the suitability of historical public statues spontaneously, before these actions made the news?
Sibling comment links to the Wikipedia article, which links to a news article, in case you need a refresher.
- In The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor Lavalle turns H. P. Lovecraft's most racist story ("The Horror at Red Hook") on its head, retelling it with a black protagonist. The most memorable thing about the book was that Lavalle dedicates his book "To H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings".
I wasn't aware when I first read Lovecraft in high school of how deeply racist he was. Anyone who isn't aware, as I wasn't, should read the article by Nnedi Okorafor, who won the World Fantasy Award a few years ago: http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2011/12/lovecrafts-racism-world-fa...
The Lovecraft poem quoted there is absolutely appalling. In her article, Okorafor says: "Do I want 'The Howard' (the nickname for the World Fantasy Award statuette. Lovecraft’s full name is 'Howard Phillips Lovecraft') replaced with the head of some other great writer? Maybe. Maybe it’s about that time. Maybe not. What I know I want is to face the history of this leg of literature rather than put it aside or bury it. If this is how some of the great minds of speculative fiction felt, then let’s deal with that... as opposed to never mention it or explain it away. If Lovecraft’s likeness and name are to be used in connection to the World Fantasy Award, I think there should be some discourse about what it means to honor a talented racist."
- I've been reading westerns the last few years, and (especially in the older works) see a lot of ethnic stereotyping and racism. I'm currently reading The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie. The writing is brilliant - in the westerns I've read, the only writing as good has been Willa Cather's. Guthrie is a master of free indirect speech, and most of the narration is in that form. So the characters - mountain men of the 1830s - largely tell the story. But I don't have another book (out of over a thousand) where the "n-word" occurs as frequently - an average of maybe once every 3 - 4 pages. However ... there are essentially no black characters. It is almost always used by white characters to refer to other white characters, to Indians, or to themselves (the way we'd say "this guy" or "that guy").
A more general point is how you deal with someone who did good stuff but also held, say, racist views. Within reason, I think you should credit the good things but be honest about the bad. People will differ about what falls "within reason".
- I've enjoyed Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays since high school, and still enjoy reading them. He was progressive for his time, and staunchly anti-slavery. But I was disappointed when I saw some of his journal entries in which he denigrates black people, Irish, Indians, and Chinese.
- I took a course in existentialism and phenomenology in college. When we started the section on Heidegger, the professor (Izchak Miller, who later became part of the NetHack dev team) began by putting on the screen Heidegger's infamous statement made as rector at Freiburg. Miller said that, as a Jew, he was disgusted by Heidegger's Nazi sympathies, and that someone that smart should have known better. Nevertheless, he said that Heidegger was simply too important to be ignored, and that we would examine his philosophy - and that he left it up to us to think about how we would regard his moral failings.
What's interesting is the trend itself, after decades of liberation why are we on eggshells? Is this emergent or a purposeful effort? What is this doing to current art? How much longer will this persist?
I suspect it's related to the extreme "partyism" we see today. Moral issues are now political issues. And while our personal lives have been liberated, our politics are both judged harshly and used as our identity. I think new art is suffering, that interesting things don't thrive in a partisan environment: this is the popularity-fueled echo chamber you're probably aware of. I don't want to believe this will last long, I want to say that people are losing interest in their dogma and want to hear new music again. But I'm not confident in that at all, I feel the trend has yet to peak.
The quote above ( https://artofericwayne.com/2020/08/01/hyper-moralization-the... ) is talking specifically about people actively removing art, but I see the same hyper-moralization inspiring these book revisions.