Last Tuesday, director Steven Spielberg, responsible for such classic films as Jaws, Indiana Jones, and Jurassic Park, spoke at Time magazine’s “100 Summit,” where he expressed regret over changes he made to E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial to make the film sync with modern sensibilities. When asked about the censoring and editing of language in books and films deemed “insensitive” and “non-inclusive” to make them more politically correct, such as Roald Dahl’s children’s books, Spielberg said, “For me, it is sacrosanct. It’s our history; it’s our cultural heritage. I do not believe in censorship in that way.”

This is an increasing practice in our cultural environment. Not only were Dahl’s works edited to conform to modern standards, but other authors were edited, such as P. G. Wodehouse by Penguin Random House; R.L. Stine; Ian Fleming with his James Bond novels; and also Agatha Christie. The phenomenon is not limited to living authors or just books. For example, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been canceled and constantly attacked for standing for the radical idea, which was the norm until recently, that there are only two genders. In the realm of films, not only did Spielberg make changes to E.T., but there was also the controversy over episodes of The Simpsons and about editing and almost removing the classic film, Gone With the Wind.

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As Douglas Murray over at National Review has reported, the entire industry of entertainment and book publishing has increased the hires of “sensitivity readers,” which, as he explains, are “a new class of professional encumbrances, employed by almost every major publishing house, whose job it is to read the manuscript of a book and look at it through the eyes of some infinitely fragile person: someone who, for instance, might mistake literature for a ‘safe space.’” 

For its part, The Spectator has described this new profession as an arm of enforcement on the part of progressives, and it is in acquiescence to those censors that an author can avoid being canceled.

Taken together with cancel culture, the rise of Gender Ideology, Critical Race Theory, assault on the rule of law, transgenderism, open borders, etc., there is certainly a movement to change society and culture, which conservatives criticize as “woke.” 

Wokeism can best be defined as a series of social, cultural, political, and economic policies which seek to deconstruct established social, cultural, and political institutions in favor of historically marginalized groups in order to achieve equal outcomes (equity) through the coercive use of state power. Once those oppressive structures are deconstructed, the left believes we will all achieve utopia. No wonder, as Victor Davis Hanson said, many feel “we are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France.” 

In short, this present historical moment is what the writer Rod Dreher has called “soft totalitarianism,” and only by standing for truth and permanent things can this new cultural revolution be defeated. As Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) said, “Truth is the only ground suitable for man to stand upon.”