Nick Cohen: A woke witch hunt has taken over the arts
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-woke-witch-hunt-has-taken-over-the-arts/
Remove the preconceptions that stop you seeing clearly, and it is hard to tell the difference between how the arts are treated in the UK versus a dictatorship. In Russia and China, the authoritarian state is the oppressive force. In the West, the state won’t arrest you for breaking taboos, and for that we must be grateful. But perhaps we should refrain from being too pleased with ourselves.
Woke – or if you don’t like the word, identitarian – movements rather than authoritarian governments can still force degrading confessions to ideological thought crimes. Friends can still denounce each other, as if we were in America during the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s or China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Fear can still run through the arts, publishing and the liberal press. And, as in true autocracies, the price of speaking out can still mean losing your job and any chance of alternative work in your chosen field.
The accusation that Greig had endorsed an unorthodox opinion was enough to send him into frantic efforts to save his career
So commonplace are the symptoms of fear we barely register them now. A few days ago, to quote an example that got next to no publicity, an ‘interdisciplinary artist’ called Rosie Aspinall Priest took it upon herself to go through the social media of David Greig, a Scottish playwright and theatre director, as if this were an entirely normal way to behave – in the arts today I am afraid to say it is.
Her snooping paid off. She announced that Greig was guilty of ‘openly liking transphobic tweets’: a career-destroying offence, as she must have known. But how transphobic did they need to be to finish Greig off?
One tweet Greig liked referred to ‘gender madness’, a sackable offence, apparently. A second contrasted the police’s cruel arrest of an autistic girl, who had said that one of their officers looked like her ‘lesbian nana’, with the cops’ light handling of a transgender activist who allegedly punched a gender-critical feminist in the face.
So you can be sure I am not misreading this, here is the tweet Greig liked in full. He was damned for endorsing the sentiment that ‘if you are a 16-year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26-year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women’s rights rally, you will just be cautioned’. And that was it.
Understanding of people with disabilities in general, and with autism in particular, is in short supply. Far from being praised, Greig was forced to issue a grovelling apology for his ‘careless and harmful Twitter actions’. He promised that he would speak to HR – the modern equivalent of taking instructions from the parish priest – and ‘discuss making organisation-wide training available to ensure we approach these matters sensitively’.
Like so many other cases, the cancel campaign at the Edinburgh Festival has illustrated how bizarre our culture is becoming. Let me count the ways.
Spying and informing have become normalised. No one ever criticises an ‘interdisciplinary artist’ or anyone else for acting like a nark or a stool pigeon. They are public benefactors rather than sadists or busybodies.
Evidence of real harm is not required. To the best of my knowledge, no one suggested that Greig had discriminated against trans actors or against anyone else for that matter. The accusation that he had endorsed an unorthodox opinion was enough to send him into frantic efforts to save his career.
Meanwhile, apologies in the progressive world are now entirely divorced from repentance. No one cares if they are insincere. Everyone accepts that fear rather than true contrition inspires them. PRs, lawyers and friends tell anyone under fire to just say whatever they need to say to direct the Eye of Sauron elsewhere.
If artists do not apologise, they get the JK Rowling treatment: people who ought to be their friends turn on them for fear of being denounced themselves. After Rowling took up the gender critical cause, every star in the Harry Potter movies came under pressure to disassociate themselves from her. I have no doubt that many were genuine in their condemnations. But no one should pretend the spectacle did not have a McCarthyite element. Like authoritarian governments, authoritarian movements want to isolate their targets by tearing the natural bonds of affection and provoking friends into denouncing each other.
The most compelling parallel with dictatorship, however, is in the tentative nature of protests against such censorship. Artists do it obliquely in a code that only the initiated understand. The National Theatre, for example, dare not take on woke culture directly. But it has revived The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 reaction to McCarthyism, just when we need it the most.
There’s a contemporary feel to the passages in Miller’s autobiography Timebends describing how he decided to set a play in the witch mania that seized the small town of Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1790s. By the early 1950s, Miller was a successful playwright – he had made his name with Death of a Salesman. Like many on the US left, he had been associated with the Communist party in the 1930s. The association was brief and long ago, but much like endorsing a JK Rowling tweet today, the tenuous link was more than enough to destroy him.
‘McCarthyism’, whether practised by Joe McCarthy in the Senate or the House Un-American Activities Committee, was not a genuine effort to uncover Soviet influence in the US, which had been widespread in the 1930s and 1940s. Rather it became a purge of anyone with left-wing sympathies. To save themselves, targets had to name names, and damn people who may once have been their friends as Communists.
‘In effect,’ Miller wrote, ‘it came down to a government decree of moral guilt that could easily be made to disappear by ritual speech: intoning the names of fellow sinners and recanting former beliefs.’ How like the 1950s the 2020s appear.
Elia Kazan, who was to go on to be one of the great Hollywood directors, asked Miller to visit his home in New England. The two had worked together. They were friends and an artistic team, and now they had to decide whether to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller, a man of principle, was never going to name names. But as we can see today, principles come at a price.
Miller describes how he and Kazan left the house to walk in the woods:
He was trying, I thought, to appear relieved in his mind, to present the issue as settled, even happily so. The story, simple and by now routine, took but a moment to tell. He had been subpoenaed and had refused to cooperate but had changed his mind and returned to testify fully in executive session, confirming some dozen names of people he had known in his months in the party so long ago. He felt better now, clearer.
Kazan told Miller that Hollywood executives had spelt out to him that he would never work again if he did not satisfy the anti-Communist politicians in Washington. Miller sympathised with Kazan, just as we should sympathise with today’s artists who parrot party lines to save their careers. It is always a very big deal to expect someone to throw away everything they have worked for.
Miller thought Kazan a genius, and saw that ‘to be barred from his métier, kicked into the street, would be for him like a nightmarish overturning of the earth itself.’
We have a culture of spying and guilt by association backed up by HR departments and forced apologies
And yet, and yet, Miller understood that he could be ‘up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I had attended meetings of [Communist] party writers years ago and had made a speech at one of them. I felt a silence rising around me, an impending and invisible wash of dulled vibrations between us.
Miller asked: ‘Who or what was now safer because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate himself.’ A question we should also ask today.
As Miller was leaving, Kazan’s distraught wife Molly told him that most Americans agreed with the witch-hunt. Miller nodded and said that, yes, he supposed that they did. Trying to make conversation, Molly Kazan asked where Miller was heading to, ‘and I said that I was on my way to Salem. She instantly understood what my destination meant, and her eyes opened in sudden apprehension and possibly anger. “You’re not going to equate witches with this!”’
But he was and did. The genius of The Crucible lies in its depiction of the bureaucratisation of coercion. In the final act, the frenzy that led teenagers to condemn innocents to death for witchcraft has passed. The authorities sense the public mood is turning against them, and are now desperate to justify the judicial crimes they have presided over.
They want John Proctor, Arthur Miller’s compromised hero, to confess to convince others that the Devil has indeed been abroad in Salem, and the panic and the executions of innocent people were not an enormous crime. In a scene straight out of the contemporary progressivism the witch-hunter Darnforth insists on the need for public humiliation:
Danforth: Proctor, you mistake me. I am not empowered to trade your life for a lie. You have most certainly seen some person with the Devil. Mr. Proctor, a score of people have already testified they saw this woman with the Devil.
Proctor: Then it is proved. Why must I say it?
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