Revisionism is always authoritarian!

 

Just reading about the Dahl revisionism and trying to fathom the principles underlying the revisionism that’s already fact rather than a discussion.

There’s a Time article that succinctly lays out the ‘concerns’ about Dahl.  Megan McCluskey’s journalism here ought to be a lesson for Australia’s media workers, who seem barely capable of repeating public relations rhetoric, let alone understanding the issues or, heavens forbid, investigating the story to explain its details.

Three things become apparent very quickly when you look into the controversy–

1. There is no rational, principled basis for revisionism that is not based on ideological a priori authoritarianism.  That is, someone says it must be so and imposes a rationale based solely on the power to enforce it.
2. The ‘concerns’ raised are largely a matter of bourgeois pretensions, with little relevance to the vast majority of humankind, the latter being concerned more with the existential priorities of subsistence than any moral preening in first world salons.
3.  The sole basis for revising Dahl appears to be profit.  Specifically the profit the new rights owner, Netflix, hopes to generate.

Principles?

Looking for principles according to which Dahl was both right enough to be published and successful, and wrong enough to require revision today, is a fool’s errand.

Ethically, we can’t go much further than Kant’s categorical imperative about acting in a fashion you would be willing to see as universal law.  Often simplified as do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  But how could this possibly apply in a socially and politically splintered world in which there cannot be any honest recognition of a single set of consensus opinions about language in literature? 

Bourgeois authoritarianism

You’d have to make an assertion that such a consensus view exists.  The assertion itself reveals the authors of the Dahl controversy, its disseminators in the media, and its consumers, to be a bourgeoisie with time and taste for the concerns of first world salons.  Perhaps also people aspiring to those things.

However, this still means imposition of a priori commandments: ‘We say it is so, and we say this must be done because of it.’  No matter how much any member of the bourgeoisie thus described might wiggle and squirm, it comes down to an authoritarian edict.

There is no ground for sanitizing language or public perceptions about prejudices that is not ideological.  Meaning that there can be no proof that supposedly prejudiced language is materially harmful in specific ways any more than there can be proofs that sanitized language prevents such harms.

No one but the bourgeoisie cares one way or the other: most others are focused on existential subsistence priorities, and plutocrats care only about matters that affect profit.

Political economy … again

No one cares to admit it, but the confluence of belated Dahl estate apologies for the man’s less than saintly character, the acquisition of the rights to his work by Netflix, and the revisionism of Dhal’s works in print, all point to only one underlying principle: profit

The recognition of Roald Dahl’s prejudices has nothing to do with ethical contrition or righteousness.  It is based solely on anticipated further profit squeezed from the late author’s intellectual property.

The estate acted on the anticipation of royalties.  The publishers might have acted on pressure from Netflix to remove potential sources for confected and hysterical outrage from all the usual suspects.  And Netflix acted the way any American corporation does: smooth the way for relatively uncontroversial profit by removing potential causes for confected outrage and boycotts.

Profit aided and abetted by ideology is always fascism, even if it is a genteel, bourgeois fascism in this case.

It says much more about the kind of people who fancy themselves arbiters of public ethics than it says about Dahl, whose sins may be the lesser in the long run.